“I’m looking for the controls, all right?” she said. “The voices are telling me, controls are everywhere…just got to—” She smiled. “Got ’em.”
Rachel couldn’t see anything different. “It’s just a wall.”
Yvonne used her right index finger to draw a big rectangle on the wall…it was like dragging an image on a Slate screen.
But then half a dozen different colored boxes appeared inside the larger box Yvonne had sketched. Each one was marked with symbols.
Rachel could see the Long Legs approaching now, as if moving in for the kill. What would it feel like, she wondered? Would she be ripped into pieces? Or would her death be even creepier…being absorbed somehow? Sucked dry?
Closer and closer…
“Got it!” Yvonne shouted.
“What?”
“Just…everybody hold on! Seriously, I mean.”
Rachel looked at Pav. She could hear the scraping, skittering sound of the Long Legs approaching. What? “Grab the pipe,” Pav said. They all did.
With her arm hooked around an alien tube, Yvonne brushed her hand across the panel.
Rachel immediately felt her vision distorting, whether due to her eyeball changing shape, or the habitat itself, she couldn’t say.
It was as if a gravity wave passed through them, simultaneously stretching the buildings, walls, and ground around them, squashing them…and dragging them toward the Long Legs and the plate.
But Rachel and the others held fast.
The Long Legs was slammed into the wall behind it, not hard enough to damage it…just to pin it.
“Here goes,” Yvonne said. With difficulty, as if she were being pulled toward the plate herself, she touched the panel that activated the duplicator.
The Long Legs twitched, then froze as a massive electric jolt surged through it. Then it began to smoke and melt, matter dripping down the creature’s sides as it began to shrink. Rachel wanted to look away but couldn’t. She wanted this thing gone; if this was how it had to happen, too bad.
In less than a minute, the Long Legs was gone. Yvonne shut off the power.
“How did you do that?” Zhao said.
Yvonne seemed surprised. “I guess I accessed the gravity controls.”
“The what?” Pav said.
“The whole NEO is, ah, filled with clumps of super-dense matter. There’s a…a system of magnets that moves them around, which is why we have Earth-like gravity even though we should be bouncing like balloons.” She blinked, confused. “I can’t believe I know all that, somehow. It makes my head hurt and my stomach ache.”
Zhao turned to Pav and Rachel. “The cat’s-eyes, you called them. They can be controlled.”
“Great,” Pav said. He had knelt to hold on to Cowboy. The dog seemed eager to sniff the remains of the Long Legs, and Pav was holding him back.
Zhao was taking a moment to be an engineer again. “Gravity. Nanotech plasm. 3-D printing. Morpho-genetic mapping and retrieval. I’d love to see the main computer and power station for these things.”
“Soon,” Yvonne said, tapping her temple. She looked tired, but satisfied somehow. “We’re on our way to some answers, I think.”
Rachel was still distracted by the awful, gagging smell of the electrocuted Long Legs. It was like burned plastic times ten.
As for the Long Legs itself…there was sizzling black matter spattered all over the plate.
“Is it dead?” she said.
“For the moment,” Yvonne said. “You can never really kill these things.” Incredibly, as Rachel looked on, several puddles of former Long Legs goo began to shape themselves into squares, as if forming up for battle. “Oh my God, Yvonne, look.”
“That’s what I mean,” Yvonne said. “We’ve got to go.”
She made several additional passes at the control panel, which then, magically, closed itself down and vanished, leaving the wall as blank as it had been when Rachel first saw it.
There was a portal not far from them, large and, to Rachel’s mind, industrial; it was worn and stained from the passage of God knew how many tons of goo or other fluids. There was a spillway of sorts, and channels leading from that to pools in the “city.”
It also smelled bad, exactly like a sewer. Rachel’s overwhelming impression of Keanu, at least the parts she had seen since leaving the human habitat, was of nasty odors. “Are you sure we should go through here?” she said to Yvonne.
“My voices are telling me it’s not the best route, but it is the most direct.”
“Are we going to have to walk much farther?” Pav said.
“I’ll show you.” She led them through the portal, striding purposefully now, like a woman with a mission. For a moment, Yvonne reminded Rachel of Megan going shopping. Her mother often said she did not possess the woman’s shopping gene, the one that apparently allowed you to visit any store for infinite amounts of time, lingering and looking. Megan Stewart walked into a store with a list and walked out with an item soon after.
Rachel, too. She wanted to walk in and out of this store.
They wound up in a tunnel much like the one they had walked through earlier…old, still used, lit by some faint glowing element in the walls themselves.
“Now what?” Zhao said. “We’re close to collapse. I don’t think we have another multikilometer hike in us.”
“Wait,” Yvonne said. Rachel could hear a faint rumbling from down the tunnel. She immediately thought, Not another cat’s-eye!
“Ah, everybody stand back….” That was all the suggestion they needed. Rachel grabbed Cowboy and joined Pav and Zhao and Yvonne against the tunnel wall.
With a notable gust of wind—air being pushed through the tunnel—and a throbbing roar, a module slid in front of them and stopped.
The “car” was open on the side facing them—the interior was featureless and appeared to be designed to transfer goods as well as passengers.
As for the passengers—the car would have easily held a creature as wide as an elephant or as tall as a giraffe. Rachel found what might have been a restraint strap positioned above eye level. But when she touched it, the material crumbled.
Yvonne noticed. “I don’t know how long it’s been since this has been used.”
“We’re in no position to argue,” Zhao said. “How do you make it go?”
XAVIER
“Where’s Zack Stewart?” Brent Bynum said. He was sitting on the floor of the Temple, the tipped-over Woggle-Bug terrarium in front of him…together with its smear of roiling, growing bugs. Weldon was with him; so was Harley Drake.
Gabriel Jones was asleep or unconscious a few meters away.
Xavier Toutant heard Bynum’s question as he hurried down from upstairs with food. Jaidev and his Bangalore guys were hard at work on…something. It had taken Xavier quite some time to get them to whip up some “fruit” juice and stew.
Xavier liked the fact that he had somehow become important to Jaidev and Nayar, and especially to Mr. Drake and Mr. Weldon. It reminded him of his first weeks at the restaurant, when Chef Charles realized that he wasn’t all thumbs and could be entrusted with independent tasks, and spent time talking to him during his cigarette breaks about cheap-ass Le Roi and the stupid customers. All that had ended when Xavier got busted, of course.
But so far, during his days on Keanu, he had felt that way again. As if he had a job, and that people trusted him to do it.
Even though he was hungry and tired, and more than a little worried about the Woggle-Bug deal, and about Chitran coming back and saying Camilla had been the one who killed her…and about Camilla, who seemed to have vanished…being sent to find Mr. Weldon had made Xavier almost unspeakably happy.
Right up to the moment when he found him with the one they called Bynum. Xavier had been surprised to find that being on the inside wasn’t fun all the time, and this was one of them. If he hadn’t already dealt with the monkey, or with Chitran, he would surely have run away in fright. But he remembered the man from the RV! Knew he had been gunned down by the Chinese fellow.