“So much for your theory,” he told Chameleon. “No air cylinders here. But it is a fitting graveyard. Just one more tombstone to erect.”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself, Mallory. Turn to the left. A little more. There. What’s that?”
Sixty or seventy meters from the edge of the destruction, there was an object. “I don’t recognize it,” Mallory said, not really trying.
“Exactly,” said Chameleon. “Walk us over toward it.”
Mallory started to protest. What was he, a puppet on a string to this AI implant? But then he thought: what the hell? It would all be over soon anyway. He thought of his former self, so idealistic, so eager for life. Like a child. A child who never grew up. Just now, he felt no curiosity at all.
“Just like I thought,” Chameleon said when they were halfway to the object. “Look at those markings. It’s Cascadian.”
“So what?” groaned Mallory. “Another piece of debris.” But his eyes studied its peculiar, spherical shape as he drew nearer. It was like a giant egg, white as snow, with a transparent slice through one side.
Light streamed out through the slice.
“Mallory, I think—”
His heart was pounding now. Because he saw what the thing was, he saw what was inside it. “My God,” he whispered. “So that’s what they look like.”
The Cascadian appeared unconscious. It was twice the size of a human, with a sort of jointed torso and sinewy arms that looked more like leaf-covered vines than flesh and blood. It had a small, tube-shaped head from which dangled three sets of purplish organs resembling bunches of grapes. Its entire body was bathed in a white light so brilliant it was almost blinding, even through Mallory’s tinted visor.
“Is it… alive?” Chameleon asked.
Mesmerized, Mallory just stared. Then a red indicator flashed inside his helmet, signaling that his tank was empty and the five-minute emergency air supply had engaged.
Great, he thought. I’m the first human to see the face of my enemy, and now I get to die. Just great.
“Mallory, I have an idea. Maybe it breathes oxygen.”
Mallory snorted. “And maybe it breathes chlorine. What are you proposing?”
“See those octagonal plates beside the transparent slice?”
Mallory nodded.
“They look like controls, don’t they?”
“You mean… get into that thing with him? You must be out of my mind.”
Chameleon ignored the joke. “Quick, Mallory. Time is short. If it breathes air with oxygen in it, you might just survive until rescue arrives.”
It occurred to Mallory that Chameleon would survive anyway, its silicon neurons impervious to vacuum or oxygen depletion. This made Mallory very angry.
“All right, damn you.”
He began pressing the octagonal plates. They lit up when he touched them, but nothing else happened. He realized it must be some kind of combination. He tried pushing several plates at once. He tried pushing them in different sequences. His air was running out. Then he got lucky.
The transparent slice opened out, and Mallory saw that there were two of them, one inside the other, a kind of airlock. He stepped in, and the floorplate lit up, and the outer slice closed.
The inner one opened.
I can’t believe I’m here, thought Mallory. The egg was big enough for him and the Cascadian—barely. The creature seemed to be in some kind of hibernation. Or dead. The white light he had observed earlier was radiating down from panels in the ceiling, and he could see wires curling from the panels to a silvery globe embedded in the wall above the Cascadian’s head. Some kind of generator, he thought. Photosynthesis. But that would mean—
“Take off your helmet,” said Chameleon.
Mallory felt his heart begin to race. It was against every safety regulation. It was insane. He didn’t have time to test this air. There was no telling what it was composed of, what the pressure was, what sort of alien microbes were present.
He felt suddenly drowsy, so very, very drowsy.
“Mallory!” a distant voice called. “Your emergency tank’s empty. Open your helmet!”
Sleep. I just want to sleep.
“Mallory!”
Chameleon. Good old Chameleon. You will live, my silicon friend. You are my better half, and you will live.
Then, somehow, his helmet was off, and his ears were ringing, and his nostrils burned and his eyes watered under that bright, bright light, but his lungs expanded… contracted… expanded.
His head began to clear.
“You did it,” said Chameleon. “I knew you would. I just knew it.”
“Oxygen?” Mallory asked.
“Look.”
Mallory shielded his eyes from the light and looked at the Cascadian. The purple grapes on the thing’s head were changing color now, turning red, then blue. Its “leaves” were changing, too, going from yellow to green. All the while this was happening, Mallory became aware that his breath was coming easier.
“Don’t you see?” asked Chameleon. “It’s a C02 breather. It’s taking the air you exhale and absorbing the carbon dioxide and giving off oxygen.”
Mallory blinked. “But is that possible? No single plant could—”
“This isn’t an Earth species, Mallory. From the light input it’s absorbing, I’d estimate its metabolic rate at something comparable to your own. Once you reach equilibrium, the two of you could sustain each other indefinitely.”
Great, thought Mallory. Just great. My enemy—humanity’s enemy. The thing that did this to us, that almost did so much more. Red rage swelled inside his chest. Kill the invader! Kill!
He looked the alien over. Not much, up close. Thin, weak, unconscious and vulnerable. It looked like it might be injured: some of the “vines” on its lower torso had been torn out, detached, and were withering. It would be so easy to finish the job.
“Don’t be a fool, Mallory. He’s recycling your air. Kill him, and you die with him.”
Mallory closed his eyes against the rage, the race-hatred, the instinct for revenge. Chameleon was right. Kill it, and he would be killing himself. But… did he care enough about himself not to?
“You made it, Mallory. You were right all along. You’re safe now. As long as our friend here keeps breathing, we should be able to survive for days. And this will be the first place the rescuers come when they find no survivors at LDC-3.”
Noise. Noise in his head. Damn the noise. Damn it all, anyway. Who cares? Mallory shook his head. Who cares if I live or die? What does it matter? It’s only me.
Then he looked up again, stared at the Cascadian. Arrogant butchers! They’d come without warning, bold and brutal, their aim the total conquest of Earthspace. Only the Lunar Defense Complexes had stopped them. And at such a cost…
Mallory felt the anger maturing inside him. They’d failed… this time. But what if they tried again? He squinted. The light in here could be the finish of his retinas, but it gave him an idea. The Cascadian might require light similar to that of its native sun. Light could be analyzed, broken down into a spectrum, compared to the spectra of various nearby stars.
We could find their home world, Mallory thought excitedly. At last, we could learn their point of origin. Sure, it was a long shot. Humans used incandescent light sources whose spectra were closer to a red dwarfs than to Sol’s. But then, human beings didn’t live by photosynthesis. And even if it was a long shot, it was better than nothing. It was a beginning.