Diurnal rhythms were maintained and simulated in Alliance Base 17 with a series of electropsionically linked phosphobuds which were embedded, strategically, in ceilings and walls and corners. They were like little whimsical baubles, skin glasslike, gas-lit amoebas from the Uatian Plains twinkling and dancing within. They had their own small union and their own small language; they were paid in alcohol cleansings, protein sprayings, and free health insurance.
This was a necessity for much of the carbono-and-siliocoformous employee population of Base 17, who composed 82% of the live-in staff. It had been requested directly from the Sentient Resources Offices. Living without simulated day and night, so it had been stated, made them ‘kooky’.
This bristled at Steve. Kooky. Kooky, him? He would have banned nighttime all together if it had been up to him. He was deeply, direly afraid of the darkness, and he disguised this fear the same way he disguised all of his other many fears: with a thin veneer of loud agitation. It was prey instinct, was how he always explained it (this was a speciocentric excuse, Robyn, had she cared to argue, would have said. It freed him of the responsibility of acting as a free-thinking individual with mental bonds and associations beyond those purely sociobiological. She, fortunately for Steve, did not care.)
Night-time in Alliance Base 17 reminded him of the Bathypelagic countries of the Glow-Oceans–under the Glow-Oceans–where the saltshine, on account of the crushing oceanic pressure and the utter lack of nutrients or oxygen or hope, did not grow, did not reach. In those places the gleaming flats of floating saltbloom made a hard, sudden ceiling. It was oppressive in its own way, a too-quick demarcation between our-place and their-place.
The Bathypelagics got really bad when you couldn’t see the saltshine at all. When the darkness crept over your own eyeballs, around them, invaded the tubes and hollows behind them. Swallowed you, digested you, made you nothing.
‘And that’s why I’ve gotta have the lights on when I sleep,’ Steve explained. ‘Because my prey instinct–my prey instinct’s twisted, alright? I’m like–I become a freak. I can hurt people. You’ve seen it, Mick.’
Mickey nodded solemnly. ‘Yes, very much. Monstrous.’ He had no idea what Steve was talking about and simply sensed from Steve that he might as well just agree with whatever it was he was saying.
‘You’re like a werewolf. You’re like Naruto. That’s so cool,’ Beth said, awestruck at the primal darkness that hid within Steve’s unassuming frame.
‘Yeah, I’m like that. That’s me.’
The phosphostand was not nearly enough light. It was greenish, sleepy, flickering in accordance to the movements and feelings of the amoeba. Its halo encompassed the front halves of the crew of the Assistance Impressing; rendered facial features sharp, shimmered on Steve’s moist form.
And beyond it, a wall of shadow. Bathypelagic; the saltshine slipping away. A real fire might have been kinder; the darting warmth; the smell; the distracting apophenia in its dancing. Fire was, unfortunately, a political issue on Alliance Base 17. It needed to be licenced with the Staphan Drone Unions, and then approved of by Maintenance, and then Atmospheric Services had to be consulted.
Night fell differently in different parts of Alliance Base 17. In the offices it was a pleasant dimming of the background phospholight, as the remaining electric lamps bristled on, thrumming blue. The cool glow of an electromagnetic monitor screen, the scent of steaming blat-tea, the hushed plans, the dreary eyed shutting of folders and trudging, finally, back to the dorms.
It was similar in the RAS nooks, whose quietness was always of a slightly sacred bent, gardeners with dirt and oil stained skinweave gloves tending to tiny patches of shifting RAS flowers, backs straight and petals turning upwards as they gravitated towards the ceiling on ancestral impulse, mending shattered comm units or battered speeders on long benches with sparking foamspray emitters, praying exasperatedly over a blackened hole in the gut of an engine the size of a fist. When night came the conversations were less terse; faint laughter might be heard. The subtle divinity in there was replaced, briefly, with a kind of homeliness.
The hangars did not acknowledge night; its workers were loud, its lights were bright. Ships came and went in accordance to symbols completely unique to each–numerical imagery symbolising the positions of suns and moons on distant planets; positive tidings in the dreams of an oneirocalculator; the inclinations of the arms of obscure mechanisms; the position of sand and detritus in a glass cylinder. The workers smoked at night–that was the main difference. So with night came the low, bitter scents of burning eyesbark, coiled-up crookweed, Zattan salt boiled in porcelain pipes.
But the crew of the Assistance Impressing were in the heart of Atmospheric Services. It was dark there even in daytime. The horizon (the roof, rather) was impossible to see through the knobby branches, the hanging sheets of sharp, curled leaves, drifting vines, sinking iridescent slime moulds. There was always movement in the corner of your eye–a gleaming bird with iridescent, see-through skin; a centipede the size of a human arm, face blue and blank and bulbous with a symbiotic fungal bloom; a floating ball of loose, leathery flesh that ambulated on faint gusts of wind, nibbling at moss patches on low branches. Mickey was constantly overturning leaves and exclaiming loud, adoring ‘N’awwww!’s at whatever he uncovered, and only stopped when, finally, he revealed a sort of chunky, metallic ladybug that gazed up at him with a pair of beady black eyes and asked him if he had a lighter.
He hadn’t, but Beth did, and the ladybug-woman lit a comparatively massive cigarette and, as she wandered back off into the leaf litter, said:
‘Fanks a lot kid.’
Mickey grew quieter after that, though his eyes remained big with awe and adoration.
Even with a clear line of sight, the horizon was swallowed up in the faint, twisting blue mist that was exhaled from the A-Serv’s roots that would, eventually, convalesce into the oxygen and nitrogen needed for the station’s employees.
When night fell there it fell hard and sudden. The mist was a starless, empty horizon. It went greenish-yellow to yellow, to red, to a bruised purple, to, finally, a faint blue with a distant, swamplike phosphorescence that faded, slowly, to blackness.
The air, which had been previously still and moist, faintly electric with neural impulses, grew cool. Root systems exhaled; the air billowed. It howled softly in leafy crevices, nooks where pallid gangly-armed ape-things (who were technically part of the wider body-system of Atmospheric Services and were therefore considered employees) hooted quietly. Where in the day the trees and shrubs chatted congenially amongst themselves and with passersby, at night, they went silent. They had been told by Sentient Resources that carbono-silocoforms tended to require a state of brief, recurrent perennation, demarcated by the dimming of the phosphobuds, and that this state was fragile, was liable to be broken, even, by their own harmless yammering.
So they were silent, but for whispering gossip amongst themselves in the thickets where the raggedy, twisting trunks came too close, too thick, to be walked through. Or for a few quaint ‘Ouch!’es when Mickey clumsily crushed a pile of fronds here, bumped into a sapling there.
‘Ah! Gawd, that was some good good camping. Some great camping everyone. What say we call in a pizza and just, uh, kick it in my room?’ Steve had said when the phosphobuds began to go out, one by one. The sky seemed ablaze; the air was cool. There was no ceiling in sight, no office spaces, no blat-tea machines. The dirt floor which had been transplanted from Staphas went almost three kilometres deep before it finally hit the metal shell of the base itself. There were caves there, within which lizards and spiders and some more reclusive employees lived.
‘Stepannus, your room is a one metre by one metre box. And half of that is taken up by your moisturising creams,’ Robyn said. She was focussed mostly on the novel she had fished out of a library in First Union Mound, the spaceport capital of Staphas. Like much literature from First Union Mound it predominantly contained themes of labour revolution, arson, and lesbian yearning. It was terrible and steamy, which was exactly what Robyn had been searching for.
‘Mick’s room,’ Steve said, unfazed.
Mickey shook his head. ‘The girls have been energetic of late,’ He said, smiling proudly. ‘You should have seen how much of their water they sublimated just this morning! It’s so exciting. Oh, but, uhm, it does smell faintly of rotten meat.’
‘That’s probably cause you keep feeding them rotten meat,’ Beth piped up.
‘It’s healthier for them! Fresh meat strains their little digestive pads.’
Sophie’s attention had been locked on the tiny amoebic movements within the phosphostand. She hadn’t been camping in years, and was trying to think of things that you did on camps. Roasting marshmallows were out of the question; the phosphostand released a cooler, wetter light, and had a tendency to perceive any food within range as an offering which it would latch onto and eat. She was onto something, she knew it.
‘Oh! We should tell stories. Scary ones. To distract us.’
‘You’ll kill me,’ Steve exclaimed, crawling closer to the phosphostand. ‘How’s scary stories gonna distract me from the scary forest? That’s just gonna kill me.’
Sophie ignored him: ‘Like that Apeman thing you kept talking about a while back. What was with that? You said it lived here, right?’
Steve froze completely solid. His eyes peered over at Sophie for mercy, then locked onto the phosphostand.
‘So that’s what this was about,’ Robyn huffed, lowering her book. ‘The Atmospheric Services Apeman is little more than a few dark blurs captured on the cheap equipment of panicked idiots and conmen with nothing better to do. Then the Media Team decided to encourage its circulation with the idea that it would “spread publicity”.’ She tapped the book against her knee impatiently. ‘All it ever brought us was even more panicked idiots and conmen with nothing better to do.’
Mickey nodded solemnly. ‘Camera crews were getting lost in the A-Serv for weeks after that. There were these guys who got stuck in there for a whole month. They found them right as they were about to eat their cameraman. I helped disinfect his thigh when they pulled the fork out of it!’
‘D’you think it’s real?’ Sophie asked Mickey.
Mickey shrugged. ‘They said they had really good evidence, but they lost it when they had to eat their camera.’
‘Of course it’s real,’ Beth said, shooting up. They had been laying lazily on their pack for much of the evening, munching on loose leaves and pebbles they picked from the ground. All of their energy had returned. Their eyes were wild. ‘I’ve seen it.’
They all looked at Beth in horror, except for Robyn, who looked witheringly at them for a brief moment before returning to their book.
‘It’s gotta be real,’ Steve agreed. ‘I’m telling you, the universe would never let me have this kind of peace. Oh gawd. Everything’s getting small. My prey instinct!’ Steve laid low to the ground, flopped onto his side, and began expelling faint white caffeine gasses from his pores that, in the waters of the Glow-Oceans, would have been mildly poisonous and, in the oxygen of Alliance Base 17, made him smell faintly like Gatorade. He made a weak squeaking noise, like a deflating balloon.
Robyn hoisted him up from the floor and deftly jabbed him with a finger in a spot right behind his head. The gasses stopped expelling immediately. ‘Stop it, Stepannus. You’ll dehydrate yourself.’
Steve bristled, humiliated, in Robyn’s claws. ‘You don’t know the Apeman, Rob. It’s a monster. It eats whole goats–it throws big rocks at them and then while they’re stunned it rips them in half, just for fun. And then it rips those halves into more halves, and so on, until it’s big hands can’t even hold them anymore. And then it eats them. Like a friggin blood-and-division stew.’
‘I don’t think we’ve ever had goats in Alliance Base 17,’ Mickey said.
‘Cause the Apeman eats them, pal!’
‘When’d you see it?’ Sophie cheerfully asked Beth.
Beth grinned. ‘I thought you’d never ask.
Beth had gone on plenty of camps and hikes in Atmospheric Services. It was a good place to stretch one’s legs, to reconnect with nature, to find oneself, to shirk responsibilities and get blasted on slightly illicit maguswood bark imported from the Kzsach Ystacki on the other side of Staphas and dream faces and goblins in the landscape. Not that, Beth explained to Robyn, they had personally done either of those last two things–it was just a good place to get them done, if you were into that kind of thing. Which they weren’t.
On one trip, accompanied by one of their exes, somebody else who would soon become one of their exes, and Greg from the RAS nooks, they had plunged deeper into the A-Serv than ever before. The outer limits of Atmospheric Services blurred the line between ecosystem, employee, air conditioning system, and office space. It was rugged out there, of course, more rugged than many of the live-in employees on the base were used to. But it was, in truth, quite gentle; it had been made to be gentler. There were paths, here and there, dry and barren of plantlife, where A-Serv had disallowed the movements of precious nitrogens through the soils, directing back to the offices proper. The thorned vines didn’t hang as low as they could have, the fungal blooms expelled fewer spores, and with less violence. The gnarling of the branches, the milk-white wood, was less extreme. Even the forest itself was chattier, babbling on about things like the weather, the radiation measurements in the space outside of the station, a beetle infestation in a tree a few kilometres away.
It was still, technically, a workspace, and an extension of the open-plan office spaces. Beth had more than once encountered a co-worker typing away at a desk, incongruously planted next to a stream, had leant against the wrong tree and accidentally let loose an avalanche of loose sheets and an anguished groan from the branches above.
But there was a deeper space. Other employees weren’t banned from it, persay. But it was far, and it was hard to reach. The A-Serv wouldn’t ever admit it, but there were rumours that it took measures to keep people out of that deep, central space. An uncannily large swathe of bushland blocked off with an overgrowth of thorned ivy; a lone pathway rendered impassable by a cross of fallen trees that had not been there previously. Strangely orderly rows of trees with little jaggedy fruits like glistening four-ended stars that emitted a sour, faintly hallucinogenic stink.
Though it was on the Alliance payroll, though it referred to itself with ignoble Tradespeak, Atmospheric Services was nevertheless a Kszach, simultaneously the Staphan word for forest but also royalty, king royalty. CEO, boss, chief. Lord. It had grown from a cutting taken from Kszach Szzismer of First Union Mound itself.
Times were different, of course; Atmospheric Services was the first Kszach to germinate since the Great Arson of Kszach Szzistine-Gattmer, when Drone Unions started to gain political power all across Staphas (so assisted by even more arson). Atmospheric Services was well aware of this, far as it was from its home planet.
And, yet, a Kszach it was. Nobility was inherent to it. Regality permeated its undersoil mycelium. That deeper space was its one reminder of this; its silent palace. There was a Staphan word for places like this, and that word was Yszachys: throne, liminal, regal, undisturbed, cavern. Cavern-Forest.
‘Yeah, so, Greg, like, had this oxylight machete thing and we just kind of blasted our way in. Through all these thorns and crap.’ They mimed swinging a machete. ‘And we were asking the whole way, you know, “do you mind if we chop this one? Or this one?” but A-Serv was quiet like it sometimes is. Guess it was busy or something.’
‘And you just kept cutting?’ Robyn asked, tilting her head.
‘We didn’t cut that much. Only when it was, like, too thick to even go on. I ripped all up my favourite jacket, then, dude. It was in shreds.’
Robyn gazed silently at Beth for a few more moments before returning to the book.
‘It was dark as balls in there. And humid as hell. You literally couldn’t see through all the leaves above, they were so thick. It’s super weird and quiet and Greg’s bag, like, was opened, and a bunch of stuff had been taken out. The weirdest thing was his spare torch. We found the torch after a bit and it’d been opened, but the batteries were gone. And that’s, like–that’s smart, you know? That’s some real intelligence and dexterity. That’s like, what’s the word. When someone’s evil?’
‘Evil?’ Sophie suggested. ‘Evilling?’
‘Cruelty,’ Mickey added.
‘It had an M,’ Beth said.
‘Malfeasance?’ Robyn suggested
‘That’s not a word,’ Beth shot back.
‘Malice!’ Steve exclaimed.
‘Malice! That’s malice. Greg kept spinning around the whole trip, you know, kept checking his bag. I thought I’d actually lost my torch but I had just–’
Robyn looked up from her book. ‘So did you see the Apeman? Did that happen at all?’
‘Oh. Yeah!’ Beth dug through their jacket and pulled out their comms. They scrolled through them for a while, and then held them out. ‘Greg got this picture of him!’
A shocked gasp ran through the group that died and shrivelled when it reached Robyn.
‘Is that a hand? Or a foot?’ Sophie asked. ‘Or… a neck?’
‘Goodness me,’ Mickey said. ‘It seems angry. The energy of this photograph is dark.’
‘Oh my gawd. For the love of gawd. It’s true! It’s true!’ Steve exclaimed, turning over in horror, going pale, and expelling caffeine again.
Robyn picked him up again and jabbed him, turning his panic response off once more.
‘Beth. What is this?’
The picture resembled, maybe, a chair being flung at a cameraman in a dark room. Or, possibly, some kind of rapid and frantic chemical reaction. Or an abstract piece representing familial detachment and self-alienation. In one corner, one of the red leaves of the A-Serv was recognisable, gleaming white in torchlight. The top right corner was covered by either Beth or Greg’s finger. There was bright electric light, blurred brown forms, perhaps an elbow, flashing red eyeshine, a faint stage of wet red soil on a backdrop of pitch blackness.
It was a nonsense image, but there was something ominous about it, something in the oversaturated crisp light that died suddenly into blackness only metres away, the way the limbs morphed and distorted and blended in the shadows. The faint skeletal forms of the trees in the background.
‘It’s the Apeman!’ They exclaimed proudly. ‘It ran right by us. We could smell it first, all soury, like rotten fruit–’
‘Just like the other stories,’ Steve gasped.
‘But it was completely quiet otherwise. But then the smell got closer and closer and I think we spooked it? So it freaked, and Gossman or Gussman, my other ex, fainted right there, but Greg snapped this thing. And we ran for it.’ Beth smiled with the exact same cheer they smiled with when telling any story. They glanced around at the forest around them, at their phone, and their grin briefly faltered.
‘Hoo! Is it quiet here, or what?’
‘Oh gawd! All the birds and forest animals get quiet when the Apeman is near!’ Steve exclaimed.
‘The animals are quiet because we’re here,’ Robyn hissed.
Sophie looked around in awe. ‘So the Apeman is right here. Just around. I wonder what it’s doing right now.’ Sleeping or foraging, she thought to herself, not wanting to ruin the possibility of a group discussion. Of the little she knew of apes, those were basically the only options they had.
‘I just can’t imagine how a creature so large would be able to even sustain itself in an environment like this, while also remaining unseen. I couldn’t pull it off,’ Mickey said.
‘I hear it hibernates,’ Steve said. ‘Sleeps for years until it wakes up and murders a goat or a hiker. And then goes right back to sleep.’
Mickey’s face scrunched up as he considered that. ‘I can’t imagine there’s much nutritional value to a goat and hiker diet. Even assuming it eats roots and tubers and such…’
‘Some people think it’s more metaphysical,’ Beth pointed out. ‘So it’s, like, a nature spirit. Or a ghost. Or it’s from another dimension or the future, or it’s on super high compressions. Greg thinks it’s a quantoform who’s here to warn us of, like, horrible tragedies and stuff.’
‘What if it’s a dude in a suit?’ Sophie asked. ‘What if it’s just a guy who works here? There’s lots of people who work in the A-Serv.’
Steve scoffed. ‘A dude in a suit has been haunting this forest for years? Devouring goats? How would he even eat them through the mask?’
‘If it’s a dude in a suit, I wanna meet them,’ Beth said. ‘That’s the sweetest scam ever.’
Robyn reached over and grabbed the comms out of Beth’s hands. She looked closely over the picture. She reached over to a series of small knobs on the side of her helmet and adjusted them slowly.
‘Well. I can’t tell if it’s fake or not,’ she said.
‘Fake! I wouldn’t fake this. I lost my best jacket over this, I wouldn’t fake that!’
‘It wouldn’t be the first time you’ve tried pulling this on us,’ Robyn said, looking closer at the photograph.
‘Oh! Like when you showed us that picture of your dad, but it was just a close-up of one of Mickey’s love handles you shopped a face onto,’ Sophie said.
‘Or when you said that the Fifth Presicess of Yarnap was your distant cousin and you showed us a picture of her next to you, but it was just a picture of Mickey you edited her face onto, and then you painstakingly edited his body to look just like hers,’ Steve added.
‘I can’t believe that one got me,’ Mickey said morosely.
‘That took ages,’ Beth said, smiling fondly.
‘Yes. Or that time we needed you to take a picture of your signature on one of the Chiralis Matrix maintenance forms, but you had instead taken a picture of one of Mickey’s gills and edited that into the entire form. Which you then signed. Instead of just signing the form and taking a picture of it,’ Robyn said bitterly.
‘Why do you keep using me, Beth?’ Mickey asked.
‘Your body is like a canvas to me dude,’ Beth said, lying down and holding up their fingers at right angles to encompass Mickey’s form like a frame. He posed gracefully for them, graspers against his head.
‘Nevertheless,’ said Robyn, passing Beth’s phone back to them. ‘I see no reason to believe this image at all.’
‘Greg can back me up.’
‘I don’t trust Greg.’
‘I can get–’
‘I don’t trust the exes whose names you can’t remember, either.’
Beth laid down and huffed. ‘Your loss, babe. If you don’t want to live in my world of cool ghost apes you don’t have to.’
‘Couldn’t we go to that place you went?’ Sophie asked.
‘No!’ Steve yelped.
‘Sure!’ Beth said. They looked at Steve. ‘Don’t worry, dude! If you’re right, it’s probably hibernating now. And it hasn’t even directly hurt or killed any employees or anything yet, other than the people who got themselves lost.’
‘That’s because it isn’t real,’ Robyn grumbled.
‘And if it comes to it,’ Beth said, a dark and intense look coming to their face. ‘I will sacrifice my life to save you.’
Steve wriggled in Robyn’s hand. ‘Well. What do you think, Mick?’
‘I’d love to sacrifice my life for you, Steve, you know I would. But my girls, you know?’
‘I’ll raise your girls, Mickey, if you give your life for Steve,’ Sophie said. ‘But I’ll try to give my life for you first. So you don’t even have to worry about it.’
Steve nodded at all of that. ‘And if I give my life for Robyn, and Robyn gives her life for Sophie, we’re all covered. This is rock solid. Maybe we are ready to go.’
‘I’m not sacrificing anything for anyone,’ Robyn said. She looked at them all, and paused. ‘But I suppose the walk would be nice.’
Beth did not, of course, remember the exact path they had taken. They did know the general direction to go in, which was, vaguely, inwards.
‘We’re going the right way when we start getting all the thorns,’ they said, marching forwards, holding their bomber jacket close to their body. They moved with the intrepid boldness of somebody who was only wearing their third or fourth favourite jacket.
For a while, the walk inwards was about the same as the walk to their campsite. Paths that led back to the central offices were aplenty, they came across an office or two, and even a pair of RAS gardeners stinking of maguswood bark who nodded sleepily at them as they walked by.
And they went deeper. The humidity grew, steadily. Clouds of bright, fat spores were carried between the trees on low breezes, passed over them and left them coughing. The leaves grew thicker, interlocked closer. They seemed sharper, had a texture like brittle metal. Sophie cut her finger on one, had it bandaged up by Mickey.
Even at that point, the character of the A-Serv had changed. Its noises seemed more distant, seemed to echo further. The vegetation was close, but gave way, occasionally, to great, endless halls of knobby wood and thorned vines, that stretched into mist. The conversation from A-Serv itself was rare, and terse.
‘What do you think of the Apeman?’ Mickey had asked it.
The huh? The where? The shrub replied.
‘The Apeman. That lives here. The Atmospheric Services Apeman.’
The where? The huh?
Mickey’s face pursed with frustration.
‘Remember that one camera crew we had to get out? Where they ate the camera? They were looking for it.’
The shrub went completely silent. They all waited around it in silence. Something unseeable flitted in the treetops and hooted at them.
They continued onwards and only stopped when a tree a few steps down continued talking: How’s something as large as that going to sustain itself in an ecosystem like mine? And, what, stay unseen? That’s whacky talk.
‘That’s what I said!’ Mickey replied. ‘Unless it’s metaphysical in nature. Do you ever get nature spirits here? Ghosts?’
There was no reply. They had sunk into a small valley, where the soil was moist beneath the dried leaves and stems. A pale purple fungal bloom squatted a few metres away from them, like a glaring toad. Dark dead soil, the bony skeleton of a sapling, slender fruiting bodies with round, iridescent knobs. The trees parted, formed a distant V shape. The wind whistled when it came down that passage. The leaf cover above was growing thick. The sounds there were strangely muffled. They moved on in silence.
‘Hey, so, by the way,’ Beth said, carefully brushing a heavily thorned vine to the side. ‘Did anyone have an oxylight machete?’
They had come to one of the great thorn patches Beth had talked about. A thin layer of glinting leaves rested over thin white branches, intertwining and twisting in a spiderlike mass. Huge knifelike thorns jutted from it all. They winked. A dusky darkness fell over everything; light came through in pale greenish beams through the leaf cover. The patch stretched indefinitely, disappearing into the shadows, between twisting trunks and branches.
Mickey stepped closer and gently brushed a thorn with one of his thicker tendrils. It pressed into the skin.
‘These are very sharp. They’d tear a jacket to ruins.’ He frowned. ‘This is very unsafe.’
‘We can’t turn back now!’ Sophie said. ‘Anyways, I definitely have an oxythingy machete. Just gimme a second.’
They rested, took swigs from bottles (in Mickey’s case it was more of a small metal barrel), as Sophie plonked her huge backpack on the ground and began digging through it.
‘No. No. Nuh uh. Uhm. What? No. Nope,’ she said, as she pulled out broken clocks, a set of comms glued together, a stapler, an unloaded pistol, a commercial oxylight machete, a tiny cracked monitor, a bowie knife, all from her bag.
‘Sophie, why do you have a gun?’ Robyn asked.
‘Got it!’ Sophie exclaimed, revealing a small carapace knife handle with a tiny metal tank strapped to its back. ‘I was trying to make one on my own but I forgot about it. I think I got it working, though.’
‘Mickey for the love of gawd step back,’ Steve, who was resting on Mickey’s shoulder, begged.
Sophie held the handle out and flicked a switch. Nothing happened.
‘Huh. Guess I didn’t,’ she said, turning it around, shaking it, looking directly into a small hole at its top. It started to hiss.
‘Sophie!’ Mickey yelped.
Gases were forced violently from a tank into a delivery system, where a tiny spark ignited them. Chemicals roared, atoms whizzed. Miniscule galaxy-stuff all rattled frantically together. The sound this all made was: VSSSSSCHHH. A bright green blade, shaped like a thin leaf, forced itself from the handle, right by Sophie’s head, through the branch she was standing next to.
‘Oh!’ She exclaimed, stepping back as the bottom half of the branch popped clean off and fell to the forest floor. ‘Look! It works!’
‘It works!’ Mickey exclaimed, his terror immediately transferring to excitement.
‘Dude, can I use it? Can I hold it?’ Beth asked, racing forwards.
‘Wait, I gotta use it first. We can swap roles.’
‘Can I use it after Beth?’ Mickey asked.
‘I ain’t okay with this,’ Steve said, peeking from behind Mickey’s body. ‘Why’s it fizzling like that? Oxylight streams are meant to be smooth.’
Sophie’s oxylight machete blazed and quivered, like it was itching to escape its handle and fire off into the sky.
‘Dunno! It probably means it’s better, though!’
Steve looked to Robyn for mercy, and she nodded mournfully at him. She snatched him off Mickey’s shoulder as he rushed ahead to watch Sophie cut through the brush first hand.
‘This doesn’t infringe on any specific sentient rights,’ Robyn said, to the air, the vegetation around her. ‘Nevertheless, if you ever intend to file a complaint to the Sentient Resources Office. Well.’ She ducked as a particularly wild swing sent a bundle of thorns flying at her.
It was slow going, silent chopping, carefully shoving clumps of brambles aside. It grew darker, noticeably–Steve, who was at the very back of the pack, turned around, saw the the pale, blueish glow of the forest surrounding the patch. Even that seemed impossibly bright, compared to this. Sophie’s homemade machete led them, with its green, phosphate light, dancing quietly in the gloom as it severed stems, branches, thorns. Robyn flipped a few switches on her faceplate and turned on a set of hard torchlights attached to her helmet; Steve wriggled and his implanted comms switched on a tiny, buzzing light. It illuminated a five centimetre diameter of space, but made him feel slightly safer.
The time they spent cutting through the thorn patch was ambiguous and wavy. It was sweat drenched, the tendons in their backs aching, the little nicks on their arms and ankles and pseudopods dripping. The humid air ensorcelled them; an occasional breeze found its way down their passage, chilled them to the bone. None of them had been expecting it at all when they came out the other side. Beth, who had been wielding the machete at the time, stepped carelessly forwards, and tumbled right over.
‘I’m dead! Oh Gore I’m dead! It’s all dark! I can feel, like, blood!’
Mickey rushed ahead and Sophie joined him. They helped Beth up, in the torchlight from Robyn and Steve.
‘It’s OK Beth, you just fell into a moss patch!’ Mickey exclaimed. He looked down at them with faint envy; something about the humidity, the wet woodsiness of it all, reminded him of Ranigrous. He had thrown himself onto the great moss patches as a grub, had slid over them and tumbled around and come home drenched in mud and vegetable matter.
Beth turned around to face Robyn’s torchlight, patted their clothes down, examined their jacket. Long strips of moss and mud had been smeared onto it.
They made a noise like a deflating balloon, then shook their head and straightened their back and said: ‘It’s all good. This is only my second favourite jacket.’
The uncanny silence was immediately noticeable. Even their conversation was muffled, as if the words were being snatched from their mouths, smothered in the mud, the pale trunks that appeared drifted on the edges of the torchlight.
They might have stepped onto the bottom of the sea. There was a wall of darkness where the faintest light that crept in from the outer forest, visible only by contrast, came to an end. A stone solid interdiction at which photons seemed to be eaten out of the air. Perhaps they grew wet and heavy in the atmosphere, drowned and died. It was bathypelagic, Steve realised. Darkness so dark, so thick, you could measure the hard angles it made against the encroachment of light.
Their torchlight fared little better; the beams were heavy with tiny flitting insects and floating spores and other indiscernible particulates, before suddenly fading out, sinking into the sheer mass of the darkness.
There was an oneiric sensibility to the place; it existed in edges, corners, suggestions. Flashes of ideas. The ends of thin leaves glistening, edges razor sharp, hard as steel. Huge roots jutting from wet soil, milk pale, curling serpentine, reaching as high as their heads. Dead patches of moist red dirt, as if it were stained with blood. Dark black minerals that glinted in their lights. A bright yellow fungal growth with lumpy, umbrella-like limbs that stretched up from a rotting mass that was once a tree truck and curled upwards, vanishing.
The air was hot and close. It clung in the throat, coagulated on the forehead, dripped down your face. It offered resistance–simply walking felt like moving through water.
Robyn looked up. The beam of light thinned to nothing, vanished–then reappeared, a tiny electric dot. Red leaves, interwoven. Thick as concrete. Not a sliver of light came through them. When the quiet winds came, they did not quiver.
Yszachys, Cavern-Forest. She knew the phrase vaguely. She was faintly aware of a sacredness here.
‘I feel we shouldn’t be here,’ she commented. Her words were faint. They were stolen from her speakers.
‘We just cut through so many thorns and branches,’ Sophie said. She marched ahead, illuminated by the machete. There was no more earnest bafflement on her face, or whimsical curiosity. Her features were wrenched into a hard, unusual stoicism, and Robyn was reminded, then, that Sophie had been to darker, farther, lonelier places than any of them. ‘I wanna stay a little longer. But when we go we should go. Um. Fast.’
They were all silent for a moment, and the forest was silent with them.
‘Well! The Apeman isn’t going to find itself!’ Mickey exclaimed, with exaggerated jauntiness. ‘Where to now?’
Beth had no idea where the Apeman might be–it had stumbled onto them, after all. They had no direction except deeper. The darkness made this harder than they expected–after an hour of ginger stepping, of holding eachothers shoulders and tracing hands across fat white tree trunks, rubbery and moist and bedazzled with thick chitined mushrooms, they came right back to the patch they had cut through. A fading, fizzing blue light from within called to them.
Sophie dug deeper into her backpack and found a few more torches of varying quality; a trio of battery powered pen-sized things went to Mickey who, to keep himself distracted, drew fun little patterns and dances with them. Beth got a monstrous, hand-cranked thing that, occasionally, made a sound like an old man’s cough and died out completely. This was followed frequently by Beth, now subsumed by darkness, swearing, and loudly cranking. Sophie found, finally, another experiment–a torch she had made from scratch, just like the oxylight machete.
Fortunately, when it caught fire they were right by a large patch of soggy mud that Sophie, in panic, flung it right into.
Steve was beginning to get annoyed. He was terrified, mostly, but he prided himself in the complexity of his emotional experience. The terror consumed much of his mind in a sort of buzzing whiteness. It subsumed him like water, like an atmosphere. He was cowering in a crick in Robyn’s neck, and she could almost feel the terror seeping through him, like electricity. But something was bugging him, now, at the forefront of his senses. There were noises in that inner forest; the absolute silence made any faint sound easy to pick up. They could hear the rustling of leaves as they approached within a metre or so; the plap plap plap of Robyn’s shoes on mud.
And he was hearing something else, too. Faint, quick, in snatches, before it was eaten away. Like an unoiled door creaking open, something shrill and metallic screeching. He had been hearing it on and off now for the last few minutes, and he was sure, now, it wasn’t just him.
‘You can hear that, right, Rob? You’re hearing that?’
‘Mickey’s rendition of the Yzzsthfeld theme song? I can hear it very well,’ Robyn replied quietly. Mickey sang as a method of comforting himself and the people around him, which would have worked better if he didn’t sing in Uniting-Goragirous, the international tongue of Ranigrous. It sounded like something between a huge frog’s croak and a dying engine, with the portent and stillness of an organ in a cathedral. His baritone carried further than most noises did in that place. It quavered with barely repressed terror.
‘No the screaming. There’s something friggin shrieking out there.’
‘I haven’t heard anything out of the ordinary.’
Steve squelched frustratedly. ‘Yeah but I’ve got prey instincts, Rob. We’ve got strong vibrosenses in the Glow Oceans, we can hear stuff miles away. In this humidity I could pick up a, a whisper. The tiniest fart.’
Robyn sighed and ducked under a branch. ‘I’m sure if you really are hearing anything, Stepannus, it is just one of the many animals that make up the A-Serv ecosystem. We have offices in here; do you really think we would be able to get reports filed out here, if there were dangerous creatures about?’
‘You’d probably get all your reports filed in a deadly, haunted hellforest,’ Steve didn’t say to Robyn. He instead wiggled uncomfortably on her neck, subtle enough to make it seem accidental. She reached over and brusquely shoved him aside.
Splat!
‘Was that a splat?!’ Mickey yelped through the Yzzsthfeld theme song.
‘Oh my Gore that was a splat,’ Beth said, scampering behind Mickey and digging through fallen sticks on the ground for one that seemed to make a good weapon.
‘My prey senses! I’m hearing a splat in our vicinity Rob!’ Steve shut his eyes and focussed his mind, envisioning the surrounding world as a series of light blue outlines on a dark backdrop, attempting to determine the source.
Robyn looked down and saw the tiny stone that had been flung into the puddle on the forest floor. She looked up and saw the tiny, hairy, gangling thing above that had just thrown it.
Pale brown fuzz, thin ridges, fungal gills, gangling limbs, vanishing into the branches. Flitting suggestions through the dark, compacted leaves. Torchlight reflecting against tiny yellow dots in the blackness.
The leaves shook. Robyn heard shrieking, before the leaves muffled it.
‘I think it threw a rock into a puddle from the branches above!’ Steve exclaimed, opening his eyes.
‘Move! We need to move!’ Robyn exclaimed.
The crew of the Assistance Impressing were a well oiled machine, accustomed to working together. They all moved at once, as one. Beth and Sophie sprinted directly into eachother and were then barrelled completely over by Mickey, who tripped over a root trying to avoid Robyn and fell facefirst into the puddle the rock had fallen in.
Robyn groaned in frustration and hauled up Mickey using all four of her upper actuators. She slapped his back and pointed ahead.
‘We’ve drawn too much attention! We should–’ her sentence was abruptly ended by a violent splat as a clump of dark mud rocketed from the treetops directly into her faceplate.
‘What?!’ Mickey asked, catching her.
Steve crawled from behind her head: ‘I think she was saying that we gotta–’ another clump of mud shot from above, sniping Steve from Robyn’s shoulder. He vanished into the darkness with a plop.
‘Steve!’ Mickey yelped, diving forward and searching frantically for him. He snatched him from the pile of wet sad leaves he was laying, stunned, on and stuffed him into a pocket, took hold of Robyn’s shoulder as she wiped mud from her face, and began to move.
‘What way? What way?’ Beth asked, clasping a large jumble of sticks to their chest.
‘Why the sticks?’ Mickey couldn’t help but ask.
‘I wanted one for like a weapon but I couldn’t decide so now I just got all of them and–’ they flinched away from another mass of flying mud.
‘This way! This way!’ Sophie exclaimed, machete raised in one hand, torch in the other, pointing down a path that sloped gently downwards between rows of gleaming, gnarled trees, distanced just enough for Mickey to fit through.
There was a noise in the background of it all that brought an uncanny, apocalyptic quality, a scratching, a grinding, and it took them a moment to realise just what it was:
It was the sound of leaves rustling.
Shrill shrieks like metal scarring metal rose in impossible octaves, rising, rising, rising until the air seemed like it might catch fire, might explode, before they were suddenly silenced, and there was nothing but the rustling of leaves. The bubble of entrapping, oppressing silence that had formed around them like a coagulant skin was being ripped at and torn by absolute noise.
They moved. Someone would trip now and then, an ankle caught on a root, a shoe flat in a puddle, but Mickey was sturdy and wide and he caught them, dragged them along. Sophie’s teeth were gritted silently. She cleft low hanging leaves and vines in their path. Steve yelled advice that nobody listened to. Dark shapes danced in and out of their waving torchlights; greasy, webbed wings flapped and batted against an ear or a shoulder. Something dropped out of the shadows and clamped onto Mickey’s head; Beth and Robyn pulled it right off and flung it, screeching, into the shadows, before anyone could see what it really looked like. A rain of mud, tiny stones, small branches and twigs battered them. Vines, roots, unexpected branches, spore clouds caught them, staggered, tripped them. But they moved, nevertheless, onwards.
Mickey stopped. His great bulk stood still, twisted and glanced, baffled.
‘We have to move, Mickey, what are you doing,’ Robyn hissed.
‘The thorns, we hit a thorn patch,’ he said, horrified.
‘Then we go this way,’ Sophie said, marching left into a tree.
‘Then we go this way,’ she said, just stopping herself from marching into a steep wall of moist, reddish dirt. Pale roots wormed through it and tied it together. A tiny clump of dainty red and purple flowers jutted mockingly from it above them.
‘Aha. The rock and the hard place,’ Robyn said. She turned around and looked at the path they had just walked, the trampled weeds and flowers, the cleanly cut branches, the shrubs bulldozed by Mickey. The torchlight glimmered wetly off bright yellow eyes that flitted, danced, vanished. The treetops rustled again. The suggestions of limbs formed and unformed.
‘How can you make references to classic turns of phrase at a time like this?’ Steve wailed from Mickey’s pocket. ‘That’s gonna be the last thing you ever say and it’s not even a unique saying. Oh gawd, and even the friggin ground is shaking, we’re going to die forever.’
‘The ground is shaking?!’ Beth yelped. ‘Why would the ground shake?’
The leaves rustled. The branches shook. The shrill shrieks rose, pitched, fled. Something small and fuzzy and winged scrabbled up Beth’s back and lunged off their head.
Quiet. The forest shut down all at once. It was them, shivering, torchlight flicking here and there, and the darkness, heavy as brickwork. Bathypelagic emptiness.
It stalked onto them with predator silence keeping to the edges of the light, lanky, grimy limbs, oily hair that stood in wisps. Paleolithic immensity; the muscles of the calves, the biceps, all coiled and intense. Tiny yellow eyes gleaming. It moved into the light and towered over them, stinking sour and soily, like rotten fruit. Big hands, thick fingers for tearing up goats.
‘Oh. Oh I am of so sorry,’ said the Atmospheric Services Apeman.
Mickey fainted.
The Atmospheric Service’s Apeman knew how to make tea from the leaves and herbs that grew in Cavern-Forest of the A-Serv. Not only that, he knew the exact temperature and time at which to steep it, which he did in a battered makeshift pot resting over a silently smoking fire. He refused to expound his secrets.
‘It is of between me and trees. Ask trees mayhap.’
He spoke trade-dialect in a broken, awkward manner, ending and starting sentences suddenly. His voice was low and harsh, rumbled earthily, but in a way that sounded strangely comforting. There was a nervousness in his eyes; he kept them tightly focussed on the fire. He did not meet any gazes.
He didn’t look so big anymore, now that everything had stilled, had gone silent. He was big, for sure; one of the largest carbonoforms on Base 17. He was taller than Mickey by a head, and nearly as wide. Even the immensity of his musculature seemed tamed by the way he used it to crack the lid of the pot open, to check the tea, let out a faint lemony scent and a puff of steam. A comb had been fashioned from a carved branch and with it he patiently, part by part, combed the hair on his lower arm, now his upper arm, now their opposite sides, and so on. He was squatted on a fat, sturdy stool, his vast bulk spread all out.
‘And how long have you been employed by the Alliance?’ Robyn asked.
‘Hummm. Five year? Ten? No. Seven.’ He scratched his bare cheek. His skin was leathery. It drooped tiredly. ‘I perform of. Maintenance, first. Establish station. They decide, oh, we will utilise a forest, now. OK. Forest in space. We are of transferring dirt, pure dirt, by the shipful. I think of foolish idea.’ He swung back on his stool and made a heavy breathing, hacking noise that they had realised, by now, was laughing.
He went: ‘Uah. Uah. Uah. Uah!’
‘Forest is of my. Friend, now. Just like of home, see?’ He reached aside and fraternally slapped the top of an old silicon-shelled printer. ‘I perform and report on air conditioner maintenance. Hence, my station in of Large Sentient Forest. Additionally: I must admit. I am afraid of crowds.’
Robyn tilted her head towards Steve, who rested on her shoulder: ‘The A-Serv was moved into the base nineteen years ago.’
‘That friggin long…’ Steve said, in awe, peering at the Apeman from behind Robyn’s head.
The Atmospheric Services Apeman was a nomad who moved in accordance to the regular shiftings of fungal blooms within the Cavern-Forest. His home existed in the foggy area between campsite and office space. It rested where a bloom had just been a year back; the grass was still new and faint, the trees were still faint pale sprouts. Dead grey trees, killed by the bloom, had been torn easily from the bruised ground and laid in a pile next to a stone overhang that formed the backbone of the campsite. They had dried, splintered, had become bonelike.
A hut had been constructed with a skeleton of these dead trees, overlaid with a glistening sheet of woven together leaves. There was the hint of a cheap bedroll within the hut, a plastic alarm clock designed, cheerfully, to resemble some kind of colourful bird-octopus-animal.
It was a warm, dry place, gently orange in the light of the fire. It smelled of smoke and cooked fish and unearthed dirt. Even the incongruous factory-printed desk, colossal printer, and cheap white work monitor didn’t take away from the quaint, comfortable feeling.
‘Is your friend going to be survive?’
‘Oh, Mickey?’ Sophie said. Mickey had been rock solid since they encountered the Apeman. His face was frozen into a lopsided grimace of death, his tendrils standing on end. ‘He’s having a panic response right now. The only thing that can bring him out of something like this is if everyone around him hugs him.’
They all moved, soldierlike, to hug him. Sophie nodded at the Apeman.
‘You too!’
He stepped cautiously towards Mickey’s still form, stance wide, ready to escape or attack if a threat presented itself.
Mickey remained still.
He, carefully, fitted himself next to Sophie and Beth, and, with a dark, serious look on his face, gently wrapped his arms around Mickey.
A few seconds passed, and Mickey’s muscles, one by one, finally began to untense.
‘Oh. Oh thank Rani, I thought that we had just encountered the AAAAAA–’
Sophie slapped him across the face. The Apeman looked at Sophie in shock.
‘Slapping him can also work,’ she said, an awkward, apologetic look on her face. ‘Sorry, Mickey.’
‘No, no. It’s okay. I’m okay.’ Mickey looked around slowly. He gulped. ‘Wow. Well.’ He stood there, at a loss for words. Then he straightened his back and extended a grasper. ‘Hello! I am–’ He pronounced, in Ranigrousian, a word that sounded sort of like a drumset being run over by a truck–‘From Relief Teams. But you can call me Mickey. Did we get your name?’
‘My name is translates to “Large Apelike Gentleman” in my of home tongue. Hence, my nomenclature is Apeman. I was named by my nestmates for my resemblance to apes. The animal.’
‘Your name is Apeman?’ Steve asked, in awe.
‘Yes. But my of nickname is Sapastaquarid. This may be of shortened to Quarid. It is, ahh. Amusing pun in my home tongue. Worthy of chuckle, rapid exhalation out of nostrils, etcetera.’
Quarid looked, baffled, at Mickey’s grasper, took it in his hand and moved it around and opened it, searching to see if it was hiding any nuts, fruits, or offerings.
Beth slipped over, took Quarid’s hand and jauntily shook it. ‘Hi, hi, I’m Beth. Do you remember me?’
Quarid looked hard at Beth. His face twisted viscerally as he struggled to recall. He ran his fingers over the sides of his forehead. He scratched his chin, rested it on his hands. The hair on his head and back stood on end as he plundered the depths of his memories.
‘Uhm. Well, it’s totally okay if you–’
‘No.’
Beth’s steam was gone. They stood there, somewhat lost, like a wet dog. ‘Er. It is so nice to meet you. Hey, can I ask a thing?’
‘You can ask as many of things as you like,’ Quarid said stoically. He stalked back to his stool and checked his pot once more.
‘What were those little. Uhm. The little flying things that threw mud at us? I’ve never seen them outside of here, and it’s just, you know, ahaha,’ Beth trailed off.
‘Aha. Yes. My terrible sons.’
‘Your sons?’
Apeman nodded solemnly. ‘I apologise for their many crimes and cruelties. But they are larvae, yes? Newly budded. They are nice boys at times; but they are over-protective of friend forest. Territorial instinct, yes?’
‘Oh, I’m a father, too!’ Mickey exclaimed. He chuckled and winked. ‘I know how kids can be. It’s no big problem at all.’
‘Your kids are in a jar, Mick,’ Steve spoke up.
‘The tea has been. Prepared,’ Quarid said, gathering a series of #1 Dad mugs from a big crate full of them, and filling them, one by one, with a ladle. ‘It will cure your wounds. Both of physical and emotional. And spiritual.’
‘Really?’ Mickey said, gazing into his mug.
‘Yes,’ said Quarid, filling mug after mug. ‘It can also increase performance in bed activities.’
‘Ah. How versatile,’ Robyn said, holding her mug awkwardly and looking deeply into it. It was a slow-moving deep black liquid, faintly red. Tiny brown particles circled within. ‘But I must ask. How do we get out of here? If I’m not mistaken, we have been in here for the larger part of a day. And I will be needed promptly tomorrow morning, in my office.’
‘Friend forest does not want you here,’ Quarid said matter-of-factly, pouring a final mug of tea for himself. He held the mug up to his face for a moment, let the steam creep over his lips, nose. Then, he raised the mug high in the air, tilted his head far back, and poured its entire contents down his throat at once. It sizzled.
‘Mrrmph,’ he said smiling peacefully. Steam rose through the sides of his lips. The smile faded nearly instantly. ‘Leave by any direction. You will be of deposited. It has been very pleasant to have speak with you. I have not utilised Trading Tongue in. A lengthy period. You are pleasant.’ He placed his empty mug on the ground. ‘Never come here again.’ He turned around and padded into his hut.
Robyn coughed in her corner of the camp. Mickey shifted on his stool and scattered pebbles around. Sophie poked the ground with her machete.
‘Contact me first. Utilise this fascinating device. Be careful with it; it is highly advanced and expensive,’ Quarid said, holding out to Robyn an ancient comms device. It was from before the comms even had their touchscreens, before the smellcrophones, neuralinks, before even all the coloured gem matching games. It was a big black brick with smaller black bricks for buttons. It looked like it would have made a clean three metre deep hole in the floor were it dropped.
‘I can discuss with friend forest. Ensure you passageway. That does not require of strange fire sword,’ he said, gesticulating at Sophie’s oxylight machete, which she was using to draw an image of her hand in the mud. ‘Visit yes? Drinking of tea, warming of fire. Hunting of shrooms perhaps. Perhaps bring of your children. Play with mine,’ Quarid suggested, looking at Mickey.
Mickey nodded rapidly. ‘Oh, absolutely! I will certainly bring my girls in here!’ he lied very obviously.
Quarid nodded back at Mickey, smiling in his terrifying, stoic way. He awkwardly extended a hand. Mickey looked at it, baffled, glanced back at Sophie, who shrugged. Mickey reached out to shake Quarid’s hand.
It was full of nuts and berries.
‘Oh. Thank you,’ Mickey said, carefully placing the crunching mass of squished berries and nuts in a pocket.
The tea was all finished, eventually. Quarid collected his pot and tossed it offhandedly into his hut, where it knocked something over, shattered something else.
‘Keep the mugs. From me to you.’
‘Number One father,’ Mickey mouthed to himself, holding his mug up in the torchlight as they trudged away from the campsite, following Quarid’s lead. ‘I’m the number one father,’ Mickey said proudly.
‘Me too,’ said Steve, sitting inside his own mug, being carried by Beth.
‘Same,’ said Beth.
‘Me also,’ Sophie said.
‘I am number one father,’ Quarid rumbled from the front. They all shut up.
‘You can all of decide who is second place. Third, fourth, so on.’
‘Number Two father,’ Mickey claimed proudly.
The forest was quiet and ominous, but Quarid’s voice was louder. He yammered to them as he led them, monologuing on topics such as the movement of the fungal blooms, the new and unique smells coming from his compost heap, the hundreds of heartfelt and occasionally violent drawings he received from his many terrible sons on a daily basis.
Beady yellow eyes stalked through the shadows by their sides, creeping in the branches above. One would shriek now and then, or fling a single pebble, but Quarid would look, suddenly, into the darkness, his own yellow eyes razing through the undergrowth and leaving an embarrassed silence.
The forest seemed to split aside for them. Paths and clearings appeared out of the shadows at their feet; trees bent conveniently aside. Great mossy stones were turned aside; a river crossing was bridged, conveniently, by a recently fallen tree. It seemed almost impatient. It was hard to tell how much of it was the guidance of Quarid, who moved through the undergrowth like a shade, steadily drifting forward, zigging and zagging as if through water, and how much was the forest itself, ready to be free of them.
Quarid pointed things out to them as they walked–the tiny pink flowers within the dark thorn boughs; the mounds in the dark dry grey fields of fungus where tiny molluscs lived; the glinting blue and purple berries in the shrubs he had planted and tended over his past travels.
The light came, slowly, and with it came sound. It was faint at first–a pale green gleam between the leaf cover. The noise of their own breathing, their own crunching footsteps. A bubble that had been around them seemed to have popped. They had all been holding their breaths, just a touch. Beams of gentle light slipped through faint cracks in the leaf cover that seemed impossibly bright.
They were, they suddenly realised, in the A-Serv forest. The trees, with their knobby, incongruous bodies, twisted upwards, seemed to hail the sky, the mist. Something hooted. A nearby stream trickled gently, glinted. Tiny silvery fish darted between multicoloured pebbles. The air smelled of dry dirt and ultraviolet rays, the faint whispery cool that came with the night. The sky was purple, fading to black. The shadows of the trees were hard-edged and solid.
‘So, hey, pal, how’s about we all take a little picture together, to celebrate this, uh.’ Steve stopped talking when he realised Quarid was nowhere to be seen. ‘Did he just?’
Quarid was nowhere to be seen. A breeze fell down through a field of tall, dry yellow stalks with a faint dry rustling. A fat bee landed on a flower with a head like a round white puff of cotton, making the whole thing visibly quake.
‘Did anyone get any pictures?!’ Steve said frantically. ‘Mick?!’
‘I can’t remember how to take pictures on these,’ Mickey admitted, poking at his comms.
‘Beth? Sophie?’
‘Sorry, babe.’
‘These can take pictures?’
Steve looked desperately at Robyn.
‘Better to have not,’ She said. ‘I don’t recommend we tell of this. We did more than enough damage on our own, and we didn’t even know there was something in the A-Serv.’
‘I think if he wanted to reveal himself by now, he would have,’ Mickey said, nodding. ‘I wonder if he even knows all the stories around him.’
‘I wanna prove something,’ Steve moaned.
‘Don’t worry, dude,’ Beth said cheerfully. ‘We can try the hangar’s white lady next!’
‘That’s a ghost, it ain’t the same thing,’ Steve said morosely. ‘Anyways, it’s probably just gonna be just some chick in white clothes who lives in the vents or something.’
‘That can’t be that bad,’ Sophie said. ‘Maybe we can drink some tea with her, too.’
‘You’d drink tea in a vent? You’d drink vent tea?’
The faraway phospholights faded yet. Everything took on a pale blue tint, a softness that seemed realer, truer, than the sharp edges of daytime. Night came over Alliance Base 17, over Atmospheric Services with a phosphorescence, a hum.
Meat Girls Dot Org 