The Meek Read online

  “Can you talk?” he asked.

  She stopped chewing. English had been the Official Language on Ceres. But she looked as if she didn’t understand him.

  She jumped off the Mock Turtle and stood in front of Cody. She tossed the last bit of lichen to the ground and looked up at him. He felt it again. The peace. He didn’t know why he should feel so peaceful. She was slight, appealing, no more than a hundred pounds. So human, yet with that light blue skin, those violet eyes, that white hair, so alien.

  She raised her arms in a gesture of supplication. She put her palms against his bearded cheek, and for an instant he felt uncomfortable, as if she had invaded his personal space. But then he relaxed again, made calm by the waves of tranquility he felt coming from her. He waited. He knew she was strong. To jump from one chess piece to another required a lot of strength. He knew she might be even stronger than he was. She might, with a sudden twist of her arms, break his neck. But he knew she wouldn’t do that.

  Then she did something that startled him.

  She tried to kiss him. He pulled back.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  She let her hands fall to her sides. She tried to say something, but he couldn’t understand any of it. She talked like a deaf-mute, an ungainly moaning out of which occasionally surfaced a recognizable English word.

  “Are you deaf?” he asked.

  She shook her head. She tried to talk again, as if she were attempting to explain to him why she had tried to kiss him, but the effort seemed to cause her some discomfort, and she finally gave up. She spit out a wad of chewed-up lichen, and he realized she had been trying to kiss him with her mouth full. He couldn’t begin to understand why she would do this, only that it must have some sort of significance to it, and postulated that a kiss might mean something different to this young woman than it did to him.

  “Why did you do that?” he asked.

  Before she could answer a drop-down holo-image of Ben LeBlanc appeared below the bill of his hard hat.

  The holo-image startled the young woman so much that she bolted away.

  “No, wait!” cried Cody.

  But she didn’t stop, ran through the chess pieces toward the bathing pavilion, catlike in her speed. She jumped to the buttress and in three bounds was on the roof, over the side, and out of sight.

  “Cody?” said Ben, squinting at him. “Cody, who are you talking to?”

  Cody stared at the bathing pavilion, feeling as if he had lost a big opportunity. “No one,” he said.

  “I think you better get back here. The computer indicates we have breaches in the seven surface airlocks.”

  Cody listened. Far off in the distance he indeed could hear the sound of air hissing. But why just the surface airlocks, he wondered, the strongest ones in the whole pressure infrastructure, the ones that led right out onto the surface of the asteroid? Why not the internal airlocks, the ones at the tunnel entrances and exits, of which there were a far greater number? The surface ones should have held.

  “What happened?”

  “A command was given,” said Ben. “Not from us. Anne-Marie’s trying to track it back. She thinks it was generated remotely. She’s working on triangulating the exact position.” Ben shook his head, looking scared. “What’s going on, Cody? Are they trying to kill us?”

  Ben had a point. Breaching the surface airlocks would achieve that end more effectively than breaching any of the inside ones.

  Yet as he hurried back to Laws of Motion Square, he couldn’t believe that the blue people wanted to kill them, not when he had seen such gentleness in the woman’s eyes, not when she had placed her hands on his cheeks and tried to speak to him in her tortured and inelegant way. He swallowed as the dropping air pressure popped his eardrums. He recognized the seriousness of the situation—they would not be able to fix the breaches before all the atmosphere seeped out, they would have to go back to wearing pressure suits, and they would have to work in shifts if they were going to make their remaining tanked oxygen last until Kevin Axworthy got here with his security force. Survival had to be the primary consideration now. But he wasn’t prepared to accept this act as hostile until he had more facts. And the only one he knew he could get more facts from was the strange blue woman, the woman who showed up only when he was alone, like an imaginary friend.

  Cody told the rest of the crew about the blue woman when he got back.

  “At first it didn’t matter if I were alone or with other people,” he said. “She would show up. Deirdre was with me that time at the Oppenheimer Canal. But now she comes only when I’m alone. I don’t know why she does that.”

  “And you’ve seen her twice when you’ve been alone?” asked Deirdre.

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” she asked.

  “Because we’ve all seen them,” he said. “It’s not so out of the ordinary anymore, is it? I’ve been recording the sightings in the log. If you’re interested you can see my entries on the GK.”

  Jerry shifted in his chair and pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “Why do you suppose this particular woman keeps coming back?” he asked.

  Cody gazed at the doctor. “I have no idea,” he said. “But I can tell you this. She’s harmless.” He put his hands on his hips, thought about it. “She’s just curious. She came right up to me. She jumped on top of one of the chess pieces down there. The Caterpillar. You should see the way she jumps. I tried to talk to her. I don’t know whether she could hear me or not. She spoke to me, but she spoke to me like a deaf woman. She shook her head when I asked her whether she was deaf, but I’m not sure she really understood what I meant.”

  They all stared at him. Ben finally raised his eyebrows, managing to look mystified and resigned at the same time. “At least she’s trying to communicate,” he said. “That’s a step in the right direction.”

  “I wouldn’t trust them too much yet,” said Jerry. “They’ve still taken our oxygen and haven’t given it back.”

  Cody wondered if he should tell his crew how the woman had tried to kiss him. Such behavior was odd, at least by their own standards. He decided against telling them for now; he couldn’t see the point in alarming them more than he had to. He wanted them to stay focused on their jobs. And the number one job right now was getting the surface airlocks closed again.

  Cody took Wit and Ben to the Wright Access Ramp on the south side of the city. The Wright Airlock gaped half open, revealing dark and rugged terrain outside and a black sky full of stars. Little dust devils whirled up the ramp as the precious air of their oxygen pops steadily dwindled away. Wit took out an access tool and removed the panel from the control console.

  “Looks like we have a dual patch system here,” he said. “We’re going to need a number three and a number eight.”

  They hooked in the necessary patches, long strips of optical cable, translucent and glittering with specks of blue. Cody took the remote override console out of the rover, hooked the patches into that, and keyed in the necessary override. The small screen lit up with machine-language encryption, and the console began to break the encryption. After a few minutes, the screen indicated that the code break was complete. The Wright Airlock slid shut with silent majesty. The dust devils swooned, fell to the ground, and disappeared like phantoms back into their graves.

  “That’s that,” said Cody. He radioed Russ Burke, who was coordinating the airlock effort from Laws of Motion Square. “Russ, we’ve got the Wright one closed. How are the other crew doing?”

  A holo-image of Russ appeared in his visor. “Yours will make three,” said Russ. “But I don’t think we have to worry about the other airlocks now. I’ve got some news for you.”

  “Yes?”

  “Someone’s issued commands to the remaining airlocks,” said Russ. “They’ve all closed by themselves. And guess what?”

  “What?”

  “We’re right back where we started from. Pressure’s dropped to eight millibars an
d temperature’s down to minus 50 celsius. Just like when we got here.”

  Cody frowned, feeling more frustrated than alarmed. “Any biotherm activity?” he asked.

  “None,” said Russ. “They’re all dead. There’s not sufficient moisture or air anymore to keep them alive. I’m afraid we have to go back to living in our suits.”

  To add to their difficulties, Cody learned once he got back to the dormitory that the Conrad Wilson, the security ship captained by Kevin Axworthy, had taken a hit.

  “A small asteroid,” said Anne-Marie, sitting at the communications console in the command center, “no bigger than a fist, but big enough to puncture one of their hydrogen-fuel tanks. Their maneuvers for rendezvous will have to be less aggressive in order to save on fuel, and that’s going to slow them down. They haven’t been able to give us a new ETA yet, but they think it’s going to be at least twelve days from now.”

  Cody addressed Peter Wooster. “How’s that translate as far as our oxygen supply’s concerned?” he asked. “I know it can’t be good.”

  Peter took a deep breath, shook his head. “Current reserves in the pressurized dorm and office units give us four days,” he said. “The tanks give us another six. That makes ten altogether. Like Anne-Marie says, the Conrad Wilson won’t be here for twelve. The math doesn’t add up, Cody.”

  Cody’s face settled as he went through the possibilities. “Then we’ll have to get the OPU in Actinium up and running as fast as possible. We’ll have to make it a priority.” He turned to Anne-Marie. “Were you able to triangulate the location of the remote commands yet?”

  She nodded. “They came from the Edison Foothills Habitat east of the city,” she said.

  Jerry spoke up. “I think some of us should go into those hills and see if we can find these blue people,” he said, not bothering to hide how fed up he was. “We’ll take our laser drills and our axes and we’ll ask for our oxygen tanks back. They can’t go stealing things from us. It’s not right.”

  “I’m not sure that’s practical,” said Cody.

  “Why not?” said Jerry.

  He couldn’t help remembering how the woman had leaped away from him, how in three bounds she had been on the roof of the bathing pavilion, over the other side, and out of sight. She was fast, far faster than any of them. He remembered Jerry’s autopsy results, how the victim’s musculature was more highly developed, stronger, more limber. Could they reasonably expect to be a match against these people if it came down to a physical confrontation? Wouldn’t it be better to try and outthink them?

  “Cody, you don’t seem to understand the equation,” said Jerry, pressing his point. “We need to breathe. They have our oxygen. Without oxygen, we die.”

  “All I’m saying is that our time might be better spent fixing the OPU in Actinium and getting some air into the emergency shelter across the street. At least then we’ll have a backup. As for the blue people … how are we even going to find them when they know how to hide so well? And even if we do find them, how are we going to catch them? Better to concentrate on something we at least have a chance of succeeding at.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Cody, Ben, Huy Hai, and Wit, back in pressure suits, stood guard out in the square while the others slept in the pressurized dormitory.

  Cody sat on a cable spool and stared down Isosceles Boulevard. He was thinking of Joe Calaminci, how Joe had a wife and two children on Pallas, the third-largest asteroid in the Belt, how Joe was never going to go back to them now. He thought how Joe’s wife and children now had a sudden empty spot in their lives, and how Joe’s usual physical presence would turn into a physical absence. He knew how real a physical absence could be, a big chunk of nothingness eating away at you. He wanted to do something for Joe’s wife and his two daughters. But he knew from personal experience that in a situation like this nothing could be done.

  He glanced at Witold. As transportation engineer, Wit had spent the last several days inspecting the Fermi Maglev, as well as helping Huy, forgoing sleep to get the job done. He should have been tired, should have been sagging under the extra gravity, but instead he sat on the edge of his crate, erect and alert, staring across the square, hands on his knees, poised like a hunter in a blind. Cody patched through to his fellow Vestan on a private channel.

  “Wit?” he said.

  Wit didn’t respond. He stared a bit more, then raised his hand, cautioning Cody to be still.

  The others shifted in their pressure suits, looked at Wit.

  “What’s going on?” asked Ben on the open channel.

  “I think Wit sees one,” said Cody.

  “A female,” said Wit. “Standing in that doorway. Maybe she’s the one you’ve been seeing, Cody. I saw her step in there a few minutes ago. I saw her signal to someone further down. She’s not alone.”

  Cody scrutinized the doorway. On Rhenium Lane. Big bright acrylic apples decorated the tiles on either side of the doorway. A railing along the curb out front was made of big brass numbers, pi to the twentieth decimal, all joined together. He saw no sign of the female, saw nothing but the weak shadows cast by the lights.

  “Are you sure?” asked Cody.

  “She’s carrying five of our oxygen tanks,” said Wit. “One under each arm and three strapped to her back.”

  “Really?” said Cody, pleased that the woman might be trying to help them by returning their oxygen tanks.

  “She must be strong,” said Wit.

  “It’s got to be her,” said Cody. “She knows we’re in trouble. She’s bringing the oxygen back to us.”

  Huy Hai spoke up. “Five tanks aren’t enough,” he said. “We need it all.”

  “What do we do?” asked Ben.

  “I think we should just sit here for a while,” said Cody.

  Cody heard Wit grunt, as if he didn’t agree with this tactic at all but wasn’t going to say anything about it.

  “Maybe she’s going to wait until we go inside,” said Ben.

  “Did you see that?” asked Huy.

  “I saw,” said Wit.

  “What?” asked Cody.

  “A girl,” said Wit.

  “A girl?” said Cody.

  “Teenager,” said Wit. “Maybe a young woman. She ran into the doorway. Where the other one is. She had two tanks of oxygen on her back. You think they’ve actually come to return the stuff?”

  “Why else would they be here?” asked Cody.

  Huy broke in. “My visor says it’s minus 65 Celsius,” he said. “And the atmospheric pressure’s dropped to three millibars. To all intents and purposes we’re in a vacuum right now. How can they stand it? They should be freezing to death. They should be bursting, with blood seeping out their fingernails, their eyeballs, and their ears.”

  “They have that extra layer,” explained Cody. “That meshwork of cartilage or whatever it is. And the cilia in their stomachs I was telling you about? It’s remarkably similar to alveolar tissue. Lung tissue. Jerry and I are starting to think they breathe through their stomachs somehow.”

  “But what do they breathe?” asked Huy. “There’s nothing in this atmosphere to breathe.”

  “They see well in the dark, don’t they?” said Wit.

  “Their pupils can expand to two or three times human size,” said Cody.

  “I say turn off these floodlights, go inside, or maybe hide over there, and hope they come closer,” said Wit. “Once they get close, turn on the floods. Whack them hard with bright light, see if we can take one or both prisoner. Blind them. Distract them. Get them panicked.”

  “Why would we want to do that?” asked Cody. “They’re trying to help us. Why would we want to try and take them prisoner?”

  “So they can tell us where the rest of the oxygen is,” said Wit, as if it were obvious.

  “But if they’re trying to help us,” said Cody, “why would we want to do something like that to them?” The whole idea distressed him, even though he knew he should be giving the suggestion serious consi
deration. “Maybe if we let them go, maybe if we wait and see what they do, they might go back to wherever they came from and return with more oxygen, the remaining twenty tanks. Maybe they now realize it was wrong to steal from us.”

  “Cody, I hate to disagree with you,” said Ben, “but I think Wit might be right. I think we might have an opportunity here. And we have to take it.” Ben’s voice was thin, nervous, apologetic. “Look at the situation we’re in.” Ben leaned forward, as if he knew he really had to convince Cody about this. “We won’t hurt them. None of us wants to hurt them. We’ll just go ahead and try to restrain them. What choice do we have? We just want them to tell us where the other oxygen is.”

  “Yes, but we might end up making things worse,” said Cody. “We don’t want to antagonize them. We don’t know exactly how many of them there are, but we’ve seen a good number of them now, 27 different ones recorded in the log. And if we antagonize these two, we might end up having to tangle with the whole lot.”

  Wit leaned forward. “Did Jerry actually look at the dead one’s eyes?” he asked. “Did he cut one of them open and take a good close look?”

  “Yes.”

  “And what did he see?”

  Cody sighed. “He said the eyes had certain structures in common with … with the eyes of a variety of nocturnal creatures that see well in the dark, creatures who might not like the light.”

  “Because these people live in the dark all the time, don’t they?” said Wit. “I mean, look at this place. There’s no light anywhere except for what we’ve strung up here in the square, and except for that crazy glow-moss everywhere.” Wit paused, thinking about it some more. “And aren’t you curious about them, Cody? Come on, you must be curious. They might be halfway human, but they’re still a new species, aren’t they? On the strength of that alone we should try and catch them. We’ve got a real opportunity here, and we should use it. We should get them over here and whack them with the lights. Especially if the doctor says their eyes are nocturnal.”