Chapter 5: Threat Condition

Boyd was startled awake again, Lorza upending the sleeping bag and rolling him out of it onto the cold snow. He gasped, eyes wide, and scrambled to turn his heating system on. He rose to his feet, fists clenched, and glared at the alien as she rolled up the bag and returned it to her pack.

“Are you going to do that every day? Just wake me up ‘before’ you put the sleeping bag away!”

“But you looked so peaceful,” she whined sarcastically. “The only time you’re not insulting me or throwing childish tantrums is when you’re asleep.”

“Keep it up, you giant tub of lard, and I’ll show you a tantrum.”

“Great comeback, proved my point, now pick up your backpack and let’s get moving again. I feel the best course of action is to walk you until you’re too tired to start fights, like some kind of unruly puppy.”

She crawled down the tunnel on her hands and knees, and he slung his pack over his back, making his way down after her. What was the point of even lugging these packs around? He doubted that they would need toothpaste or duct tape any time soon.

He emerged from the hole in the snow into the sunlight, seeing Lorza stretching her arms above her head and yawning. She watched him approach, waiting until he was in range before shaking herself like a wet dog and showing him with cold slush. He wiped his face with his hand, scowling up at her.

“One of these days I’m just going to strangle you in your sleep.”

She put her hand to her mouth to stifle her laughter, an oddly dainty gesture coming from such a massive creature, and reached out to pat his head condescendingly.

“I’d like to see you try, I could hold you at arm’s length, like in one of those old cartoons.”

“Whatever, come on let’s get going, I can’t wait to be rid of you.”

She followed behind him as he marched off into the snow, checking their bearing on his wrist display, Lorza still chuckling as she jogged a little to catch up.

“I’m sure you’ll agree that we have to find ways to amuse ourselves, Boyd. Don’t tell me you can’t handle a little teasing? You certainly seem to lay it on thick when you joke about my weight.” She doubled over, gripping her stomach as it growled audibly. “Ugh, I can’t believe there’s nothing to eat on this entire moon, we’ve not seen a single plant or animal on the surface since we arrived.”

“You could make a hole in the ice and go fishing,” he smirked, and she scowled at him.

“Do you think that thing is still following us under the ice?”

“Maybe, frankly I’d rather not know if it was.”

Lorza gripped her stomach again as it gurgled.

“Are you not hungry?” She asked, giving Boyd a quizzical look.

“I am, but I’m dealing with it.”

He wasn’t sure if she really believed him or not, but with any luck she’d know as little about human biology as he did about Borealan. He wasn’t about to start sharing now, it was her own fault that she was going hungry, and he doubted that the pills would even make a dent in her hunger considering her vastly larger nutritional requirements. It should only be another four or five days until they reached the oxygen farm, she wouldn’t die, so he should ignore her complaints and keep moving.

They trudged through the snow for a few hours, now knee-deep, flakes of fresh powder being blown on the wind to hammer the pair in a relentless blizzard. Most of them melted before they reached Boyd’s suit, his circuits projecting a small aura of heat around his body, but Lorza had to shake herself periodically to shed the layer of snow that clung to her white fur. Her pelt was becoming increasingly matted as the strands froze together with melting snow and ice, she looked like a walking snow sculpture. She trailed a short distance behind him, struggling against the wind.

“We need to take shelter,” she shouted over the gale, barely audible to Boyd. “I can’t keep going in this weather!” As if on cue, Boyd spotted the mouth of an ice cave in the distance, its entrance not yet buried in snow.

“We’ll take a break in there,” he bellowed back to her, “wait out the blizzard!” The wind was increasing, and even he had to admit that it was getting hard to walk, it was a miracle he had even seen the cave through the swirling snow that clogged the air.

They made their way over to it, Boyd digging through the snow that was piling up at the entrance to let them through, and they scrambled inside. Droplets of water fell from Boyd’s suit as the snow melted off it, freezing almost as soon as they hit the icy floor. Lorza shook herself, spraying him with slush, but she still looked bedraggled. They made their way deeper, this cave was larger and went further down than the previous one had, while the tunnel was narrow it was still big enough to allow Lorza to pass without too much difficulty as long as she turned to her side in places. Boyd lit their way with the glow from his oh-bis monitor, illuminating the curving walls, careful to avoid slipping on the floor as they walked.

After a couple of minutes they reached a chamber with a more level floor, and Boyd sat to rest, watching Lorza as she tried to scrape the ice from her matted fur with her claws where it had been exposed to the air. She still wore her overalls, though they were looking the worse for wear as the constant freezing and thawing took its toll on the fabric.

“Should have brought a comb instead of toothpaste,” he chided, and she shot him a scathing look. She started to unzip the front of her overalls, releasing a puff of white fur as the weight of her breasts pushed the garment open. Boyd turned away in surprise and embarrassment.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“I have to bathe, I need to get all of this ice off my fur or it won’t be able to trap my body heat properly.”

“Can you not go off down the tunnel and do that where I don’t have to see it?”

“Oh I’m sorry Boyd, am I offending your delicate sensibilities? It’s not like I have access to a changing room, if you don’t like it maybe ‘you’ should go down the tunnel. Just close your eyes and stop being so childish. Humans are so prudish.”

“It’s called having shame, maybe you should consider it.”

He turned his back to her, but he could still see her distorted reflection in the ice wall, like a funhouse mirror. He couldn’t make out much detail, but she seemed to be licking herself like an oversized cat, surprisingly flexible as she bent double to clean her fur with her tongue.

“Are you ... licking yourself? That’s disgusting, no wonder you smell so bad.”

“You’ve not bathed at all since we crashed, human, and my nose is a hundred times more sensitive than yours. You’re not exactly fresh yourself, you’re secreting pheromones and hormones that you aren’t even aware of. I can even smell traces of the deodorant that you put on a few days ago, citrus, bad choice. Should have gone with lavender, not that it would do you any good now.”

“At least I don’t wash myself with my tongue,” he grumbled, crossing his arms over his knees and staring at the floor.

“Polars are usually very clean, back home I’d wash every day with all kinds of soaps and shampoos, my fur would be whiter than snow and it would smell great. Even you would want to run your fingers through it.” He scoffed, but she ignored him. “Conditions haven’t exactly been ideal lately. It isn’t my fault the Zemchug wasn’t configured for people of my stature, then we crashed here...”

She sounded sore about it, self-conscious about her hygiene maybe? Whenever he commented on it she brought up her supposed cultural disposition towards cleanliness, maybe being stranded with matted fur and no shampoo was getting to her.

“Well I only have your word on that,” he said, “for all I know your whole race is as poorly groomed as you are.”

That seemed to annoy her, and she stopped licking to glare at him.

“What do you know? Your people don’t even have fur, you’re like little naked molerats, you look like a patch of skin that a doctor shaved to access a wound. It’s gross, makes you look sickly and clinical.”

“So do you get fleas?”

“No, actually. Our blood pressure is too high and it kills them when they bite us. You’re more likely to have parasites than I am, human.”

“You ‘are’ a parasite.”

She laughed at that, it was a bad comeback, and so he kept quiet for a while as she finished cleaning herself. Finally she pulled her overalls back on, taking a moment to adjust her massive chest as Boyd averted his eyes from the reflection. She wouldn’t have cared, and he wasn’t attracted to her of course, he just didn’t want to give her more ammunition than she already had. She sighed and stretched, apparently pleased with the outcome.

“Ah, that’s a little better, I think I got most of it. First thing I’m doing when we get back to civilization is sitting in a warm bath for a whole day. Siberia is cold, but this is ridiculous.”

“Why do you all live in Siberia, anyway?” Boyd asked.

“Oh, are you taking an interest in my personal life, Boyd?”

“Just making conversation. Gotta pass the time somehow while we wait out the blizzard.”

She sat on the ice and crossed her long legs, seeming to let her guard down a little at the prospect of a conversation that wasn’t just an exchange of insults.

“Things on Borealis weren’t great. There were tensions between the different territories, I guess you’d refer to them as countries, and while the environment wasn’t as bad as is it here it made Siberia look tropical in comparison. The Federation let us colonize Siberia and found a republic, I guess the environment there was too harsh for humans, they seemed happy to have somebody exploiting the land and we got a new home.”

While they were a member of the UNN, the Russians tended to do things by themselves, taking on their own projects and ventures without consulting anyone else. The Federation had established several Russian-speaking colonies that flew in the face of the UNN’s message of human unity, and while there were no laws specifically prohibiting that, it turned heads in the Admiralty. This might be an opportunity to collect some useful information on their relationship with the Polars, which many suspected was their thinly-veiled attempt to raise their own Borealan army outside of UNN supervision.

“So what did they ask in exchange? Surely they didn’t give you the land with no strings attached?”

“Well, we’re a member republic of the Federation, the Kremlin allows the establishment of independent nations with their own laws, language and customs as long as they adhere to some basic universal rules. There aren’t really any restrictions imposed upon us that I’m aware of. They like to show us off in military parades and on TV, but that’s just PR, we aren’t born warriors like our hot-blooded Equatorial cousins. Everyone I know who works in the UNN or the RF is a medic or a scientist, I really don’t know any Polar soldiers.”

Hmm, didn’t sound like they were raising an army then, maybe it really was just a big PR stunt to make the Federation look charitable? Then again it may have been a genuine act of charity, but in Boyd’s experience there was no such thing as a free meal.

“How about you?” Lorza asked. “Where do you call home?”

Boyd hesitated, should he tell her the truth, or concoct another convenient lie? In a way she was right, a liar should have a good memory and he felt as if his capacities were diminished in this blistering cold. Might as well tell her the truth, it couldn’t hurt.

“Utah, hot and dry, quite the opposite of this Godforsaken moon.”

“Why’d you leave your home?”

That was a question he was increasingly asking himself. He realized that she was probing him for information, much in the same way that he was, she expected to take him off-guard with that question and trick him into revealing his occupation. ‘I left Utah to become a spy’ was not something he was going to let slip so easily, even in his current mental state.

“I left in search of adventure, looks like I found it.” A vague reply, though not necessarily untruthful, he decided to move the conversation along so as not to give her too much time to think about it. “How about you? Why did you leave Siberia?” She narrowed her eyes at him, his dodge hadn’t gone unnoticed, but to acknowledge it would also be admitting to her intent, and so she let it slide. She was more socially adept than he had given her credit for, she had already gleaned his real name, he would have to tread more carefully.

“When we left Borealis on a colony ship, I had never been into orbit before, never seen my homeworld from space. You probably can’t imagine what that’s like, your species has been spacefaring for longer than you’ve been alive, but to us it was like the hand of God reached down from heaven to pluck us off the ground. Suddenly the whole galaxy opened up and my world became more than just ... a wooden cabin in the snow. I wanted to see more of it.”

“I do know what that’s like,” he insisted, “there was a first time for me too. I still remember the first time I saw Earth from orbit, my first superlight jump, the first time I set foot on another planet.”

“Makes everything seem so trivial and temporary, right?” He nodded his agreement. “My biggest concern the previous day had been finding enough firewood, and the next I was jumping through light years of space on a ship that had better living conditions than anything my civilization had produced.”

“Was it a liner?” Boyd asked. “One of those with a pool and catering and all that? I heard they commissioned every captain they could get their hands on to ship you to Earth.”

“Yeah,” she chuckled, “I had never seen anything like it before. More food than I could eat in one sitting, a heated pool a short walk from my cabin, and when we arrived ... well. Let’s just say ‘Earth’ is a lousy name for a planet, it’s as blue as a giant eyeball floating in space. Might as well have called it ‘dirt’ or ‘mud’, we would have chosen a more fitting name.”

“And what does ‘Borealis’ mean?”

“That’s the name your people gave my planet, you named it after our star. In our language the name roughly translates to ‘the great mother’ or ‘the all-mother’. In our culture our mother planet is a strict parent who cruelly disciplines her children, but it makes them strong and hardy.”

“Also sociopathic,” he chided, and she frowned.

“Maybe to you, but human behavior is just as strange to us. You’re socially crude and your interactions lack nuance, it’s like you evolved half way towards a proper system and then stopped. You may have better technology than us, but our communities are far more complex and developed, and most importantly consistent.”

“I don’t see how clawing up anyone weaker than you is a nuanced social system.”

She huffed and crossed her arms at him.

“Durâk! Those are Equatorials, I’m a Polar Borealan! Do you feign ignorance just to annoy me? We’re completely different. We’re cooperative, we solve our problems through communication, you can’t just ... beat eachother senseless in an environment where everyone depends on one another to survive. Those hairless fools have kittens by the dozen, they could lose half of them in the jungle and it wouldn’t even dent their population. Besides if I were an Equatorial you’d already be dead, mudak.”

She seemed to look him up and down, was that hunger or arousal in her eyes? It made him shiver, what was she imagining right now?

“Though I’d love to lock you in a cabin with an Equatorial for a few hours, just to see what she would do to you. That’s something I’d pay good money to watch. As much as I find their behavior distasteful, there’s something to be said for their ... ferocity.”

He didn’t know what she was daydreaming about, but he snapped her out of it with a click of his fingers. She came back to reality and stared at him curiously. Then she looked to the roof, and he followed her gaze to see flashing colors dancing on the icy ceiling.

“Is your computer-wrist-thing making those lights?”

He glanced down at his monitor, but besides the dull glow it emitted there were no such patterns. He felt his stomach drop, his blood freezing as he turned his eyes to the floor. Beneath the blue, semi-transparent ice they sat upon was a spiral of rainbow colored lights, blinking and flashing in mesmerizing patterns as they spun and whirled.

“That’s the ocean below us,” Lorza whispered, panic cracking her voice. They were both rigid, terrified to move lest they draw the monster’s ire as it circled and danced beneath them, sweat dripping from Boyd’s brow despite the cold. An unfamiliar fear overcame him, he was trained to endure the chaos of a firefight and even the dread of torture, but not this. Images of Alexei being crushed in its maw of jagged teeth flashed in his mind, that final scream replaying in his head like a broken record.

It shot upwards, slamming the ice below with enough force to knock them over, and they scrambled to their feet, racing up the tunnel towards the exit. It hit again, the ice was very thick, glacial, but Boyd could hear it cracking. The force of the blows shook the floor, the thing was incredibly powerful. He got ahead of Lorza this time, there was no way he was getting trapped behind her if she got stuck again, not with that unspeakable horror on their heels. They dodged through the uneven passage, gaining ground, Lorza slowed by her need to slip sideways through some of the narrower sections due to her bulk. He heard the beast leave the water, loosing an unearthly screech that echoed through the cave as it powered up the tunnel behind them.

Lorza panted, almost sobbing as she ran, Boyd hopping over imperfections in the icy floor as he raced ahead of her. The cave was deep and it would take them a minute to reach the surface, could it catch up with them, could it even fit down these tunnels? It had looked unwieldy when it had surfaced onto the ice during their last encounter.

He chanced a glance back over his shoulder, looking past Lorza who practically clogged the tunnel, and saw the dark mass of teeth and tentacles squeezing through the cracks behind them with its spongy body. It was like a damned octopus contorting itself into a glass bottle to reach a treat left there by its handlers.

There was another impact that nearly knocked him off his feet, and he had to grab a wall to stabilize himself. He looked behind him to see Lorza picking herself up, the monster stopped in its tracks by a crack that was too narrow to let it pass. It must have barely fit the portly Borealan, who was scrambling to her feet to continue her escape as the thing reared back and slammed its weight into the ice again. It sought to break its way through, they weren’t out of danger yet.

“Keep going!” Boyd shouted. As they rose towards the mouth of the cave, its echoing screeches grew fainter, but just as Boyd started to let himself think that they might be in the clear he heard another tremendous crack as the monster broke through.

They emerged into the freezing wind, the sun low in the sky, but it had not set yet. Boyd briefly checked his oh-bis to get his bearings and then called for Lorza to follow him, jogging off into the snow. Out of breath, she trailed behind him, glancing over her shoulder to see if the beast had followed them into the open.

They were not pursued, and so they weathered the blizzard and continued on their journey.