Zombie Starship Read online

  "We have not found it yet."

  "We?"

  "I am the last of the captains." Amid the ripples in his constantly refreshed water-and Ridge spied lobes of gray brain matter under the face, as well as misshapen bits of bone and gristle, maybe part of a nose that had not formed right, maybe a twin or a predecessor or a random growth-Venable smiled and moved his eyes rightward.

  Ridge stepped a few feet closer to the hanging red and white checkered curtain and pushed it aside. He looked into a circular command room with high-backed chairs and banks of instruments. He thought it was like looking at a massive church organ with banks upon banks of keyboards and ranks upon ranks of pipes, only the music it made was not sound but sight. The plate view screens were black and spattered with light. It took Ridge a second or two to focus and understand that he was looking at the Milky Way galaxy from a high altitude, meaning light years, meaning they had been traveling for thousands of years to get here.

  "Where are we heading?" Ridge asked.

  "Counter the flow of stars and nebulas," Venable said. "We are moving against the rotation of the galaxy, which increases our velocity manifold. It makes our search for the New Earth more efficient."

  "Then we do not know where we are headed," Ridge said.

  "Life is most likely to exist in the mid-disk, where it had time to evolve rather than in the younger, more active center, so that is where we are looking. The ship searches constantly. All its energies are dedicated to that task, except the small effort to just stay alive and keep our cargo viable." Venable smiled very logically. "Without human life to reproduce on New Earth, there would be no reason to continue on. So you understand the purpose of our suffering. You and I are broken mirrors. We shine with borrowed light. We are living borrowed lives."

  "You are wrong," Ridge said. "I am a man, and I have loved a woman."

  The water rippled as Venable shook his face. "You still do not quite understand, Ridge."

  "I understand only one thing," Ridge said heatedly. "I want to live. I want the woman back, Brenna. Where is she?"

  "Largo. You might find her there."

  "What is Largo?"

  Venable smiled enigmatically, and Ridge angrily raised a fist as if to smash the thing in the water before him, which was little more than a photograph forever developing in a tray of chemicals, or biochemicals, given that its brain lay in there under its face. Invisible forces in the air grasped Ridge's arm. He felt himself being immobilized, and a cold numbness shot through him. He gasped for air.

  "You cannot hurt me," Venable said calmly. "I almost wish you could. I might enjoy passing on into the limitless relief of eternal peace. Then again, like you, I dream of living. I dream of the old Earth. I know what it is to tango with a woman, or to ride a horse, or to sail a boat, or to sleep late and drink coffee on the patio before driving off to log in and check my e-mail. Do you get a lot of e-mail, Ridge? Nobody has contacted me in centuries, except now you are here and I am entertained. Please don't go."

  "I am a leader," Ridge said. "I will not desert you."

  "For that I thank you. Then we can be friends."

  "Yes, Captain. We are friends."

  Venable laughed. "We have little choice, do we?"

  Ridge walked into the control room. He brushed aside cobwebs and coughed in the dusty atmosphere. There were at least ten or twelve high-backed chairs before the banked instrument panels, and in each chair reposed a mummified officer. Their uniforms were intact after centuries. Their collars were encrusted with rows of gold and black bars. Each had donned a jumpsuit open at the collar, with a wide ring where a helmet might fit. Perhaps they had suited up during the ship's great emergency and never made it. The ship had somehow put a mission together, using the cells and tissues of the last surviving officer-a man named Venable. "I understand the scenario," Ridge said quietly and tapped his hand on the back of a chair, as if saying goodbye to its occupant. Then he left the star-blazed control tomb, pulling the checkered curtain shut behind him. He addressed the face in the water: "We might be able to save the ship. What other choice do we have but to try?"

  "None," the Captain said. "I might be able to help."

  "I can't do it without you. If we can't do it, let's just blow the whole thing up and end this charade."

  Venable looked dazed. "We could do that?"

  "We could and we should." Ridge leaned close, and the ship did not stop him. "Think, man. How long should this living hell continue?"

  "We must find New Earth," Venable said stubbornly. "Nothing else matters."

  "Do we have any candidates?"

  In the water beside Venable's chin appeared a blotch of shimmering black, a vision of space, and in it a faint shining object. "This is a star about five light-years of travel from here. We will make a pass by its heliosphere in another hundred years. If there is a habitable planet there, we will insert the ship into orbit around that planet, which will be called New Earth. Then the bones will come out dancing, and the music will start playing on the decks of Largo."

  "This Largo," Ridge said.

  "Two women are in there," Venable said. "You can go there if you wish."

  "Are there Cleaners in there?"

  Venable's eyes grew blank as he looked into distant data galaxies. "Cleaners inhabit every corner of the ship, keeping it sanitary and orderly."

  "The cleaners have gone mad," Ridge said. "They have eaten all the colonists."

  Venable shrugged, a mere ripple in the water. "No matter. The genetic material is safely stored and available."

  "Where?"

  "Largo."

  "Then..." Ridge suddenly wrapped his head in his arms and felt like weeping with frustration. Talking with this poor demented creature was like consulting an oracle. For every second of truth one had to endure a minutes of smoke and tricks. "What should we do, Venable? Keep breeding temporary purpose-people, temps, throwaways, like you and me? Is that fair? Does that make sense?"

  "We must reach New Earth. Go, Ridge. You have served your purpose. My purpose is not yet over but you deserve your rest now. Go to Largo. Find your woman. Sleep."

  Invisible forces grasped Ridge so tightly he almost could not breathe, and moved him bodily out of the CP. It was all he could do to move his feet in small jerky motions and keep his face up to keep his windpipe free. He heard Venable say: "We will do as you say. We have tried a dozen worlds and failed, but the next one will be our last try. After that we'll do a swan dive into the sun. We'll tango off into the sunspots. We'll let the sun tear our atoms apart and make us into hydrogen. We'll return to the beginning of time and start over with a great big bang." Venable laughed. "Thank you, Ridge, and goodbye."

  Ridge found himself thrown backwards, landing on his heels and butt and elbows, on the smooth floor in the workpod. The wall winked shut, and with it the CP closed him out.

  "You can never come back in here," Venable said in a distant whisper that trailed among the quietly bubbling incubators. "Pity, because I so enjoyed talking with you."

  Ridge rose to his feet and staggered to the nearest incubator. Inside was a human fetus, curled on its side and sucking its thumb. In its lap beat a huge bloody heart with trailing arteries and blood vessels. Its eyes were closed and it smiled in some distant dream of sunny castle ruins along the Moselle River in Luxembourg, or hordes of yellow taxis racing along Manhattan streets under a gray winter sky, or bare-chested Jivaros Indians hunting with blowguns in the Amazon basin while the white snow caps of the Andes loomed god-like in the distance.

  "Hurry," Venable's voice whispered from the walls. "There is so little time."

  Chapter 14

  Brenna ran down the shaft, rung over rung, as fast as she could. Above her were the comforting footfalls of Ridge. Below her was Tomson, and below him Lantz. At the moment, she had one thought foremost in mind, and that was to escape the mudmen. She could hear their fluting sounds in the air, both inside the long shaft that trailed off into darkness below, and in the air
outside. She could hear the chitter of their claws on the metal.

  "Hurry!" Ridge said above, and Brenna heard Lantz cry out below. An instant later, the world exploded in light as the panels of the shaft came apart. Light flooded in, and with it came the clawed grasping hands of the mudmen and their nightmare faces. She screamed as she smelled their mushroom smell, saw their round mouths with cobweb teeth, their slitted eyes with dull red retinas. She felt the cold wind of air from open rooms and shafts in the ship's nose area. She felt the rush of wind as mudmen crowded in for a meal on the four helplessly exposed humans.

  In that same instant, the combined weight of humans and mudmen made the shaft collapse. Brenna clung to a steel rung as she felt Ridge's heavy body plummet past her. She slipped down several rungs. She ignored the bright red and yellow flashes of pain in her mind as she slammed into more rungs and as her ribs brushed against a body. She had no idea whose body. She tried to scream, but had no breath for it, as the ladder with her and Lantz on it tilted crazily and then fell into open space. She glimpsed the two men falling below her. They seemed to be falling into the mouth of some brass machine that swallowed them up. It was the last she saw of them because she and Lantz were falling backwards into a heap of slag. She looked up helplessly in slow motion as a dozen mudmen grasped hungrily after her with their claws. She saw their mouths grinding as if already chewing on her flesh. Then everything went black as the dusty coal and wet slag sucked her into it like a mass of quicksand.

  Moments later, she lay on her stomach coughing. The world was a dark place flashing with mauve and olive drab lights. Her head throbbed and her lungs wanted to puke forth the dust in them. She raised herself up a few inches by pushing on the wet, foul-smelling slag with her palms. She was alive. But where?

  She stirred, pulling herself into a half-seated, half-reclining position still leaning on her palms. She looked about and expected to be killed by the mudmen any second, but she could not smell them nor could she hear their fluting noises nor could she see any eyes glowing in the dark.

  A large baseball thing lay in the slag nearby, and she shrieked. It was the head of a dead mudman. They came apart easily, and this one had not survived the tumble through a cubic acre of falling slag. The dust was still settling on its canvas-like skin and sleeping face. To be certain it was dead, she lifted a chunk of anthracite and slammed it down on the head. The head split like a bag of liquid and splashed green bile into the grainy black slag. She regretted having made the added mess, and pulled back.

  She heard a feeble moan. "Is someone there?"

  The moan again. "Lantz, is that you?"

  "Brenna, help me out. I'm stuck here."

  Brenna crawled on her hands and knees until she saw a glimmer of gray light. She felt a breath of air on her face, and smelled distant rain. She saw Lantz's pale neck and reddish hair protruding from a pool of dust and oily sand. "Hurry," Lantz said. "I'm sinking. This stuff is like quicksand."

  Brenna flattened herself and crawled across the surface of the stuff until she grasped Lantz's hands in both of hers. She felt the gooey sand pulling at her torso as she flattened herself and pulled, and it seemed the sand was winning. The sand seemed to be sucking them both down. Nearby, she noticed a grill with several vertical metal bars. Desperately, she swung herself around until she could lock her ankles around the bars. She prayed no mudmen were on the other side to pull at her feet. "Hang on," she said gasping.

  Lantz choked and sputtered. "I'm going down."

  "I've got you."

  "God..." Lantz was starting to suffocate as the weight pressed down all around her. Her hands were under the slag, pulling Brenna down. Brenna's hands disappeared under the wet heavy quickslag. Only Lantz's face was visible now. Lantz's eyes were wide with desperation and were starting to cloud over with fatigue and anoxia.

  Brenna hooked her boots around the metal bars and flexed. Pressing her forearms down flat to distribute her weight better, she pulled her own body toward the bars using her feet. For a moment, nothing happened. Then she felt the sand yield a bit. Inch by inch, she pulled Lantz out, until both women were able to pull themselves up using their hands on the bars. "That was awful," Lantz said, brushing her red hair back with muddy looking hands.

  "We're in some kind of shaft," Brenna said. She saw that the shaft had been filled in by a collapse of the slag, so there was no way to go back out the way they'd come. "I think we're buried under an acre of this stuff, and we're lucky that we slid into this drainage tunnel or whatever it is."

  Lantz rattled the bars. Metal chattered and sounded as if it might yield. "No way but forward then."

  Brenna sniffed. The air had a vinegary tang. She pointed to the dimly glowing red and white flowers of decay and fungus in the separating metal walls. "Watch out for that stuff--it will burn you."

  "Too bad it doesn't burn the mudmen."

  Brenna shook her head. "I think they're made from it, and other ugly stuff. Come on, stick with me. Let's get out of here." Together, they grasped the bars and shook them until the round grating of which the bars were part gave way. The grating fell forward onto slag, and the two women crawled forward in the gloom. "You hear that?" Lantz said, lying on her side.

  Brenna stopped also and listened. "Water." She sniffed. "Smells fresh, like rain."

  Lantz's face looked luminous in the dark. Her freckles almost seemed to glow. "Oh God. Sounds like mudmen paradise. Water, darkness, probably rats too."

  They crawled forward, because there was nothing else they could do, except stay here and die. Brenna said: "I imagine they'd love eating rats. It would be like eating their own kind."

  "I think I see light," Lantz said. She stopped again, resting on her elbows, and looked puzzled. She looked at her hands, which shone grayish-white. "Light. It's artificial daylight, made from bioluminescent bacteria."

  The two women dug their way out through a last heap of slag and emerged in a part of the ship they had not imagined. They crawled out from a wide pipe in a trail of falling slag, and emerged one after the other on what looked like a concrete subway platform. A dangling sign read in large blue letters on white enamel: Largo.

  Water dripped rain-like all around on the dark tracks, while bright biolume shown down from under the ancient green glass canopy overhanging the length of the platform. There wasn't a living soul in sight, but lights glowed with comforting strength and regularity. Several placards revealed pictures of attractive, smiling young men and women looking out with happy eyes. If it was advertising, it was enigmatic. Only the word Largo appeared again and again.

  The platform amid the tracks was of piled stone, with moss growing around the edges of the individual stones. In a passenger shelter of rippled greenish glass stood two wooden benches whose slats had grown black and brittle with age, but otherwise the place looked as though a crowd of commuters might come running up the stairs any moment to greet a train, should one come rushing out of the tunnels at either end. Instead of a train, and instead of a buzzer or a whistle, they heard mudmen fluting in the tunnels. Brenna thought she glimpsed red dots of light in the tunnels.

  Brenna and Lantz ran as fast as they could, across the wet slippery tracks. They clambered up the stone face onto the platform, ran across its chilly wet concrete squares, and down into a well-lit white tile tunnel. "Wish we still had our rifles," Brenna said.

  "We'll make new weapons," Lantz said. "No way are we going back for the rifles."

  They ran along the clean, well-lit underground. The tunnel was oval. Placards of advertisement for Largo lined the walls. Faces smiled on them as they hurried to escape the mudmen. In a motif of cobalt letters on white background, a tile sign read Exit. A blue arrow pointed in the direction they were running. They redoubled their pace, ran up a wide flight of stairs just like in a subway, emerged in a small but ornate station.

  "Wow, look at this place," Lantz said as she walked into the center of the hall with her hands in her pockets. Brenna followed her across the lavish
ly marbled floor with its inlaid images of earth globes. There were six such circles: one looking down on the Arctic, one looking up at the Antarctic, one each looking at the Americas, Europe and Africa, Asia, and the Pacific region. A glance told Brenna the maps reflected Earth around the end of the 21st Century.

  Over Lantz's head, about 40 feet up, was an expanse of glass panels, and beyond that lay the blackness of outer space. A luminous band of stars must be the Milky Way galaxy, Brenna thought. The glass panels were held in fine wooden frames that warmly covered the ceiling. A band of finely work oak several feet high ringed the transition from ceiling to walls. The oak was richly carved with gargoyles, gilded leaves, and jungle animals with glowing green glass eyes. The basilica structure had brownish-reddish marble walls dripping with creamy white inclusions, like clouds on taffy. Ornately beveled archways supported on Corinthian pillars led off in various directions, all of them devoid of humans. Still, everything looked clean and functional, if thoroughly dusty. They spotted a ticket counter with brass rails and frosted window, closed. They spotted men's and women's bathrooms behind black wrought-iron doors, locked. They saw windows all around containing advertisements that said Largo. Brenna frowned, savoring the name curiously.

  "Look here," Lantz said striding through a long hallway with a curving ceiling of metal struts and fancy Art Nouveau stained glass. As she walked, lights turned on around her and turned off just as soon as she passed. "It knows I'm here."

  "What knows?"

  "Largo," Lantz said spreading her arms as if introducing Brenna to a friend. Lantz looked up and laughed. "Largo is the name of this place."

  "How do you know that?" Brenna walked after her, amused.

  Lantz tapped her forehead with one index finger. "It's all in my head. I was in a place like this once. It wasn't called Largo, and I don't remember the name."

  Brenna shook her head. "The ship is messing with our minds. Maybe none of this is real."