Creations (41 page)

Then events took a turn of their own.

He felt it in his ears first, a slight drop in pressure, like riding a fast elevator up a tall building. Other people had felt it too and he could see them exchanging glances, looking even more worried than before. “What the hell was that?” someone said in the tunnel up above them. Rapid, subdued conversations started almost at once, around him and above him, and although he couldn’t make any of it out clearly, the same word seemed to figure in all of them: depressurisation. Yet again, Max felt a sudden realisation taking hold of him, gripping his insides. He knew the base modules were connected by pressure doors, designed to clamp shut if the skin of one of them was breached or punctured, and he knew that it was designed to happen almost instantaneously. He also knew that no matter how fast the doors were, the effect of a depressurisation taking place would be felt throughout the entire base. It meant there was only one explanation
for what had just happened. The machines had arrived.

The last man down the ladder was wearing pilot’s overalls, and he at least was moving quickly. “Something’s going on up there folks,” he said, jumping straight into the flight seat. “We need to move fast. I’m going to fly over to the fuel dump, so hold on tight.” He was already flicking switches and activating the lander’s systems even as he spoke. The luminous display screens lit up his dark, lean features as he turned this way and that, checking instruments on either side. First they heard the hatch closing, then the sounds of the docking tunnel disconnecting from the top of the craft. The pilot could be seen craning his neck to look upward out of the windows, waiting for the tunnel to swing safely out of the way. Then he set the engines running on minimum throttle, made a final check over his shoulder that everyone was ready to go, and turned up the power.

They rose quickly, immediately rotating to face the fuel store, and pitched forward to fly toward it. Max’s view from the back of the cabin was limited but he could still see the low soil-covered mounds of the underground fuel tanks as they got closer. Normally the landers would be towed over here by truck then towed to the take-off site but it looked, to Max’s relief, as if their pilot at least had realised how little time they had. Even though the tanks were supposedly dry there must have been just enough coating the sides to get them this far. They made a hard, rushed landing in front of the refuelling point, then the articulated fuel lines unfolded from the pump housings and came out to meet them. They linked up automatically, by now out of Max’s sight, and started to transfer their contents across.

It was then that the first of the machines was spotted. A group of three people, clustered up against the right-hand window, suddenly reacted together to something they had seen. “What in God’s name is that thing?” one of them said, pressing his face up against the glass. At first no one else seemed to pick up on what was happening but as those people by the window tried to
comprehend what they were seeing, it became clear that something out of the ordinary was going on.

“There’s something out there, next to that building!”

“Where? I don’t see it?”

“In the distance, where the service lines come in!”

“What the hell — ?”

By now the other passengers were jostling for position, trying to see what they were talking about but Max already knew what must have been going on. The only relief came from the knowledge that the base buildings themselves were now almost a mile away, but he also knew how fast those machines could move. He put his head back against the cold metal wall of the lander and closed his eyes, trying to block out any sign or sound of what he knew must be happening and what could come their way at any second. It didn’t work.

“Jesus Christ! It just — what the — ?”

“There’s more of them! There, and there!”

“They’re cutting into the — oh my God that’s where —”

Max couldn’t tell exactly what those three or four people were seeing but he could hear enough to realise how bad it must have been. Other people in the lander were now shouting, almost screaming at them, trying to get them to say what was going on, but whatever was happening before their eyes must have been too much to put into words. In a way Max was glad not to hear it. Instead he waited, calling on anything he thought might help, as if willing the fuel to flow into the tanks before the machines came their way. Then, at last, the fuelling process was complete. Max heard a warning tone from the pilot’s console as the fuel lines prepared to retract, and looked over to see how close to setting off they actually were. The pilot was looking off to the right, his eyes wide and his mouth hanging open, but he responded to the tone immediately, breaking his eyes away from the scene to get the lander ready for its final lift-off. This time he didn’t bother looking back at the passengers but instead started up the engines
and took them straight to full throttle, taking off vertically and turning to face the west where their ascent would take place. Max felt his weight suddenly increasing as the lander thrusted upward, though with people crammed in on all sides there was no chance of falling over. Then the pilot switched the craft over to autopilot, letting its own systems orient it for the start of the climb, and Max felt the slow, measured rotation as their trajectory immediately broke away from the vertical, pitching over to build up horizontal speed even as they rose. And it was then, roughly ten seconds after they’d left the ground, that Max saw with his own eyes what the other passengers had been seeing the whole time.

If they’d departed from the take-off site instead of the fuel store and flown out over the safe, empty ground of the ascent corridor, none of it would have been visible to them. Instead, having taken off right next to the fuel silos, their flight took them within three hundred yards of the base, giving a low level flypast of the buildings, the machines, and everything else that was laid out below them. And this time, looking forward through the pilot’s larger windows at the front, everyone got to see.

The view lasted just seconds but in that time the fate of the entire settlement was sealed. Most of the base modules were already wrecked, lights dead in viewing ports, ragged slits in the bare metal revealing blackness where just minutes before there had been light. Even the intact ones were being overrun, their soil coverings dug away to expose them to the vacuum. And it was then, just as the view slid below the bottom of the window and out of sight altogether, that another of the modules was breached, right before the passengers’ eyes. It was the corridor leading to the lander bay, the one route to safety the remaining base population had left.

They saw the initial blast of air and vapour, the torn shreds of the outer skin peeling back like paper. They saw the cloud of insulation from around the inner skin erupting like a snowstorm.
And in the midst of the cloud, like rags in a hurricane, they saw dozens of tiny shapes, all different colours, wheeling and tumbling in the gale of depressurisation as they poured out onto the lunar soil. The shapes rolled across the ground, then stopped and did not move again.

Max looked away and shut his eyes, just a fraction too late. It made no difference; the sight was lost from view anyway. He hadn’t been the only one to see it either, or to recognise what had happened. This time though there was no noise in the cabin, no cries or shouts, just silence, and the smell of fear and revulsion, dead and clammy. Max opened his eyes once and looked at the ceiling of the cabin, purely to give his mind some other image to dwell on, then he closed them again and kept them closed for a long, long time.

* * *

He spent the next two days like that, only opening his eyes when necessary, trying to block out the sounds and smells of the strangers who were crowding him on all sides. They left him alone however, much as they seemed to be leaving each other alone. Even those who knew each other had little they could communicate through words. The pilot was the only one who spoke much, usually talking to Earth, trying to arrange to dock with the May station and then get taken down to the surface. He also tried the Crisium base, as if hoping that someone there could hear and respond to him, though there was no reply. The only contact he did make was with another of the landers, which had taken off just after their own and was now following their course a few minutes behind. The passengers could only hear the pilot’s side of the conversation but he gave them the message that another twenty-five people had been rescued. It meant that barely a quarter of the base population had escaped. He then went round the cabin taking names, so that people on Earth
would know who was and wasn’t coming back.

“Lowrie,” Max said when he was asked. It was the only time he spoke.

* * *

Even with his eyes closed he didn’t sleep. The rest of the journey was spent awake, but dead on the inside. Even the image of the Earth filling the window did little for him when they finally put themselves into orbit, lining up with the May station for the transfer back down toward home. He followed the others as they slowly left the lander, going straight into a space plane attached to a neighbouring adapter. He had no memory of being assisted or guided, but he supposed someone must have been there to help them. No one from the other lander was here; they would be put on another plane he was told, that one landing in Brisbane. Max could only assume that Ariel, Joel and Harris were among them. Then, with no more delay than was necessary, the plane he was on pulled away from the station, backed off by several miles and fired its motors to slow down for re-entry. The spectacular pink glow of the plasma sheets gushing off the heatproof skin left him unmoved, as did the view of the Pacific Ocean beneath them as they descended toward Los Angeles. On the ground he just walked where he was pointed, as most of them did, before finally emerging into a sectioned-off zone of the arrivals area where a crowd of relatives was waiting. Gillian was there too. She held him tight, and he held her too, though slowly, as if the fatigue had made even that too much of an effort. She led him to their car and drove him home. At the house he went straight upstairs, taking a shower only because Gillian told him he should. Details seemed inordinately vivid for some reason: the colour of the tiles, the smell of the soap, the sound of the water hitting the floor. He was still standing there in a stupor when Gillian came in and guided him to the bedroom. She sat next to
him as he lay there, looking at the familiar surroundings of the room and trying to reconcile it all with the places he’d been and the things he’d seen just days before. It was impossible. Then the exhaustion became too much, and he finally fell asleep.

* * *

Max knew as soon as he woke that he had been asleep for a long time. It was only when he turned on the TV and saw the date that he realised how long it had really been. He had slept for a day and a half, solidly. Even now, moving was still an effort, as if the fatigue hadn’t truly left his body. He didn’t try to sit up, or even to call out to Gillian, but instead started switching through the channels, hoping to regain some strength in his body by letting his brain wake up first.

The destruction at Crisium was still dominating the news, he wasn’t surprised to see. Interviews with other survivors were being shown, some of whom he recognised from the journey home, plus pictures of the attack itself, taken by fixed cameras at the base and beamed back to Earth even as it took place. The worst shots had been edited out, but the machines could still be seen as clearly as he’d seen them himself and by now there couldn’t have been a person on the planet who didn’t know what the things looked like. What they were though, no one seemed to know.

Something Max wasn’t prepared for, however, was the real extent of the damage. He knew the main base was gone but the other Earthrise research sites — twelve of them inhabited — had all been destroyed too, as had the North Road transmitter chain leading to the far side observatory, and the observatory itself. A cargo truck which had been following the road had also been attacked, he heard. It took almost a minute for him to realise that those were the same people he and Safi had shared the transfer flight with when they’d first arrived. The plague that had started
in Mare Crisium, the Sea of Crises, had quickly spread beyond those flat lowlands, taking over any man-made artefacts it could find along the way. It meant that now, for the first time in over twenty years, there was no human presence anywhere on the Moon. It was the same uninhabited rock that Max had looked up at as a child. Then he corrected himself; uninhabited was the wrong word entirely.

Gillian came into the room at that point and walked over to the bed. She must have heard the sounds from the TV. She sat down and asked him how he was. He muted the volume and sat up.

“I’m okay,” he said. “Just tired.”

“I know you are,” she said. “But you’re safe now.” Then she paused. “I — I heard about Safi. I’m sorry, Max.”

“Thanks,” he said. “She was strong, and smart too. She shouldn’t have gone like that. How did you know about her?”

“Someone called for you yesterday. He told me what happened up there, some of it anyway. He left you a message too. It’s stored on the home account. Do you want to see it?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“I’ll get you something to eat too, you must be starving.”

Max lay still for a minute or so after she’d gone, then turned to the bedside terminal and looked down the list of stored messages. The topmost one was just twenty-four hours old. Max set it playing; he hadn’t known who to expect, but he certainly hadn’t expected to see Ariel.

“Max, your wife says you are still recovering, but I hope you get this soon. I’m glad you made it back, and I hope you managed to do what you had to do before you left. We will all miss her. Harris is with me now, but it looks as if Damon didn’t make it. That Joel character came back with us though. I think he will have some explaining to do. There’s going to be an inquiry of course, and they’ll probably call you in too, so I expect I’ll see you then, but it may not be for some time. I just wanted to say,
thank you. You faced up to those things well. I was glad you were with us. Goodbye.”